Animacies

Perverse Modernities
A series edited by Judith Halberstam
and Lisa Lowe
 Animacies
Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

M e l Y. C h e n

Duke University Press

Durham and London

2012
 © 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Animating Animacy 1
Part I * Words
1. Language and Mattering Humans 23
2. Queer Animation 57
Part II * Animals
3. Queer Animality 89
4. Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation 127
Part III * Metals
5. Lead’s Racial Matters 159
6. Following Mercurial Affect 189
Afterword: The Spill and the Sea 223
Notes 239
Bibliography 261
Index 283
 Acknowledgments

I’ve always struggled to find truly reflective words of thanks, and

these acknowledgments are no exception. The ideational and affective
matter of a book travels long and far; in my case, all the way back to
the toads hopping in my backyard in Illinois at a time when I seemed
only a bit bigger than them. So I begin with heartfelt thanks to the
toads: literally grubby and ponderous yet lightning fast with food
items; squinting as they sloughed off their own molting skin, seem-
ingly neckless but surprisingly flexible; walking, hopping, and swim-
ming; and hunched and still when I came upon them in their cold
hibernations. Toads infused my lifelong experience with their pecu-
liar, but resolute, grace, with a style of creatureliness that I could and
could not occupy. And though they were only sporadically visible, I
could be certain a toad was somewhere near.
Yet toads and frogs may not be long for this world. The latest theory
involves a destructive fungus, apparently created within particularly
benevolent lab conditions where Xenopus frogs were being studied;
the fungus was distributed globally by the popular trade in Xenopus
frogs and spread back into various ecosystems by released Xenopus and
herpetologists themselves in search of undocumented species. I must
admit to the possibility of writing into a world in which toads may
no longer be near. The style of their disappearance reminds me of the
complexities of identity, environment, and transaction, and even of
the retroactive “discovery” between a historical trace of material con-
veyance and a diagnosis of present-­day loss. Toads, too, teach me again
that toxicities have retrospective temporalities and affects, as do my
acknowledgments.
 Acknowledgments

In perhaps less “earthly” but more “worldly” circumstances, given

how such segregations have come to work: enormous thanks are due
to the many humans and domesticated animals populating the words in
this book affectively, informedly, notionally, diagnostically, insinuat-
ingly. The following categories most certainly bleed into one another;
I think of collegiality as always containing the possibility of friend-
ship, and of friendship as always containing the possibility of avoca-
tion. All were important to the making of this book, and much, much
more.
For my evolution in learning, I begin with thanking the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, Linguistics Department for fostering my
PhD work, as well as its essential partner, the Designated Emphasis
in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Both were represented in my dis-
sertation committee, mentors all in their own respects: Eve Sweetser,
Judith Butler, George Lakoff, and Trinh T. Minh-­ha. Eve Sweetser
shared her brilliant, always persuasive explorations of grammar, cul-
ture, and criticism, while modeling for me a way to rejoice unreserv-
edly in the realm of inquiry. Carolyn Dinshaw offered encourage-
ment in my first course outside of linguistics and handed me my own
issue of glq 1, no. 1. Trinh T. Minh-­ha began with me what is already
a years-­long trajectory of engagement, for which I am immensely
grateful. For life-­changing new collectivities and the provision of the
best kind of collective support, I thank the President’s Postdoctoral
Fellowship, including Kimberly Adkinson and Sheila O’Rourke. I also
thank my ucla home for the fellowship, particularly Patricia Green-
field, Marjorie Orellana, and the Center for Culture, Brain, and De-
velopment.
My colleagues in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies
at Berkeley have been stellar, both formidable intellects and devoted
colleagues. I thank Paola Bacchetta, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Minoo
Moallem, Juana María Rodríguez, Charis Thompson, and Barrie
Thorne, along with Eileen Andrade, Althea Grannum-­Cummings,
Linda Baker, and Gillian Edgelow, for providing a stimulating envi-
ronment that is fiercely supportive to all. At Berkeley, I have been
privileged to know so many outstanding students, undergraduate and
graduate. My first graduating class (in 2007) of senior honors students,
the “f6,” went far beyond my call to reflective investment, and mutual
dedication: Ian Livengood, Nikiko Masumoto, Liz Padilla, Drea
Scally, and Tamar Shirinian. My past and current graduate students

viii
 Acknowledgments

are all sources of inspiration, including Laura Horak, Amy Fujiwara

Shen, and Katrina Dodson. Anastasia Kayiatos was a research assistant
for an early version of this book and the kind of graduate student who
exemplifies utterly why I can thrive here. There are many intellectu-
ally generative centers at Berkeley with which I’ve been affiliated. I
thank them all for fostering the growth of collegial engagement be-
yond the departmental level, hence working as a form of inter- and
transdisciplinary mattering so essential to this university. They include
the Center for Race and Gender; the Science, Technology, and Society
Center; and the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
For always insightful commentary and probing questions, I thank
audiences at Mills College, University of Leeds, University of Mary-
land, Humboldt University, uc Berkeley, ucla, uc Irvine, uc Santa
Cruz, the Crossroads Conference in Cultural Studies, the Society for
Disability Studies, the American Studies Association, and especially
the insightful audience at the keynote I delivered at uc Davis’s “Queer
Privates.” I also benefited from ucla’s “First Books, Feminism, and
the Future” workshop, with thanks especially to Laura Kang, Rachel
Lee, Martin Manalansan, and Lucy Burns, for whom the workshop
was convened. I thank colleagues and friends within the Society for
Disability Studies for modeling so beautifully how to unthink the
habit of bodily optimization. I benefited from several reading and
writing groups, including the Queer of Color writing group (Huma
Dar, Roshy Kheshti, Fouzieyha Towghi), and Gender Workers ( Julian
Carter, Rita Alfonso, Don Romesburg, Rebekah Edwards, and Nan
Alamilla Boyd), and more recently, the Mediating Natures group,
with whom I had a delightful conversation.
My thinking was very much informed by an intense quarter spent as
the convener of a University of California Humanities Research Insti-
tute Residential Research Group, “Species Spectacles.” I owe a debt
of intellectual, and gustatory, gratitude to all the participants: Carla
Freccero, J. Jack Halberstam, Tamara Ho, Tonglin Lu, and Kyla Schul-
ler; in addition, I am grateful for the acumen and thoughtful support
of David Theo Goldberg and the assistance of the uchri staff. I com-
pleted the revisions of this book as a guest in the carefully cultivated
peace of the Clark Art Institute, and for that very productive atmo-
sphere, I thank Michael Ann Holly and Aruna D’Souza, as well as the
fellows who provided company and support, not least the irrepressible
Griselda Pollock. In addition to resources from the Williams College

ix
 Acknowledgments

Library, special thanks are due to Karen Bucky for ample interlibrary
loan help, which I had never used to such a degree. She enabled me to
rebuild my book library away from home, which was no small task.
Uncategorizable but perhaps all the more valuable for their remark-
able incidence in my life are my colleagues within and beyond Berke-
ley: Dana Luciano, Cori Hayden, Sunaura Taylor, James Kyung-­jin
Lee, Margaret Price, Eliza Chandler, Sarah Snyder, Lilith Mahmud,
Arlene Keizer, Laura Kang, and Teenie Matlock. Alison Kafer simply
knew there was a place for me to participate in disability-­studies dia-
logues, and with that brought me the community and scholarship of
the Society for Disability Studies, after which I cannot ever go back.
Eli Clare has shown me integrity and commitment to social justice
at its deepest. Judith Butler and Susan Schweik were supportive in
many ways.
For friendship and community over the years, knowing that not
all can be listed here, I wish to thank Margo Rivera-Weiss, Hadas
­Rivera-Weiss, Willy Wilkinson, Georgia Kolias, Jolie Harris, Jian
Chen, Kyla Schuller, Huma Dar, Emma Bianchi, Lann Hornscheidt,
Roslyn McKendry, Sophia Neely, Amber Straus, Angie Wilson, Quang
Dang, Katrin Pahl, Cory Wechsler, Alicia Gilbreath, Amy Huber,
Macarena Gomez-Barris, Gayle Salomon, Karen Tongson, Karin
Martin, Amy Yunis, Susan Chen, Keri, Ella and Omri Kanetsky, Lize
van Robbroeck, Madeleine Lim, Kebo Drew, the Queer Women of
Color Media Arts Project, Gwen d’Arcangelis, Rob and Julie Edwards,
Laurie Olsen, Mike Margulis, Jesse Olsen, Josh Olsen, Carol Tseng,
Stan Yogi and David Carroll, Kathryn Socha, Elizabeth Jockusch, Jim
Voorheis, Nate Padavick, and Mary Lum. I am fortunate that Rebekah
Edwards believed quite fiercely in this book well before its genesis as
such; I thank her for many years of creatively inspiring companionship
and helping to create an environment where I could focus entirely on
healing, for being strong and steadfast for so many. I thank Gil Hoch-
berg for the combination of great spirit, face-­breaking laughter, and
friendship at many critical times over all these years, and for letting me
meet Ella on the very first day of her life. Dev Rana provided years of
important friendship; I keep with me our many unforgettable conver-
sations about race, food, toxicity, and illness into the night.
I have indescribable gratitude for the family who raised me: Ruth
Hsu and Michael Ming Chen, my brother Derek, and my sister
Brigitte. Mom and Dad have always modeled fierce interest in justice,

x
 Acknowledgments

studying through ignorance, and compassion; the ways they continue

to change and the celebration with which they apprehend the world
astounds me. I grew up into the legacy of Brigitte’s love; her early
death shaped my senses in ways that I continue to discover. Derek is
both my brother and my friend; I feel lucky to continue to know and
grow with him. He is a model of deep thoughtfulness and great gen-
erosity, and his constant inventiveness is contagious. I have been so
nourished by all my extended family, with special thanks to cousins
Janet and Andy Tao, David Lee, and Stanley Wang, and Uncle Alok,
Aunty Elizabeth Lee, and Wu Jie Jie (Cheryl Wang). Bibim Bap and
Mikey, Fabiola and Giovanni, my present and departed cats, taught
me how to be present, to witness, to touch, to hold. Finally: Julia
Bryan-­Wilson, in such a short time you have changed my life, made
fulfillment possible in every direction; in part this has come from ac-
knowledging where I am and welcoming it more openly than I’ve
ever experienced. I honor all the hours of work you spent on Anima-
cies in its many drafts, but I also want to mark that it’s because of you
that joy has found its way into this book; in turn, this book breathes
with you.
At Duke, I thank two anonymous readers for simultaneously inci-
sive and generous analyses of the book, attentive to detail and to the
multidisciplinary implications of my arguments. Courtney Berger is
an author’s dream editor in every respect; she ushered this manuscript
through with integrity, sharp thinking, and personalized consider-
ation. I also wish to thank Ken Wissoker for identifying the value of
this project, as well as the editorial associate Christine Choi. I thank
J. Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe for finding my book worthy of in-
clusion in Perverse Modernities, a commitment that condemns them
to having my book included in their Amazon searches forevermore.
My research was supported by a uc President’s Postdoctoral Fellow-
ship, an Abigail Hodgen Publication Fund, a Hellman Faculty Family
Fund, a uc Humanities Research Institute Convener’s Fellowship, and
uc Berkeley’s Committee on Research. Portions of chapters 4, 5, and
6 underwent earlier development in three essays: “Racialized Toxins
and Sovereign Fantasies,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media
and Culture 29, no. 2 (2007); “Animals without Genitals,” Women in Per-
formance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 20, no. 3 (2010); and “Toxic Ani-
macies, Inanimate Affections,” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
17, no. 2–3 (2011).

xi
 Introduction
Animating Animacy

Recently, after reaching a threshold of “recovery” from a chronic ill-

ness—an illness that has affected me not only physically, but spatially,
familially, economically, and socially, and set me on a long road of
thinking about the marriage of bodies and chemicals—I found my-
self deeply suspicious of my own reassuring statements to my anxious
friends that I was feeling more alive again. Surely I had been no less
alive when I was more sick, except under the accountings of an intu-
itive and immediately problematic notion of “liveliness” and other
kinds of “freedom” and “agency.” I felt unsettled not only for reasons
of disability politics—for “lifely wellness” colludes with a logic that
troublingly naturalizes illness’s morbidity—but also because I realized
that in the most containing and altered moments of illness, as often
occurs with those who are severely ill, I came to know an incredible
wakefulness, one that I was now paradoxically losing and could only
try to commit to memory.1
In light of this observation, I began to reconsider the precise condi-
tions of the application of “life” and “death,” the working ontologies
and hierarchicalized bodies of interest. If the continued rethinking of
life and death’s proper boundaries yields surprising redefinitions, then
there are consequences for the “stuff,” the “matter,” of contemporary
biopolitics—including important and influential concepts such as
Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, the “living dead,” and Giorgio Agam-
ben’s “bare life.”2 This book puts pressure on such biopolitical factors,
 Introduction

organized around a multipoint engagement with a concept called ani-

macy.
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect draws upon re-
cent debates about sexuality, race, environment, and affect to con-
sider how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly, or
otherwise “wrong” animates cultural life in important ways. Anima-
cies interrogates how the fragile division between animate and inani-
mate—that is, beyond human and animal—is relentlessly produced
and policed and maps important political consequences of that dis-
tinction. The concept of animacy undergirds much that is pressing and
indeed volatile in contemporary culture, from animal rights debates
to biosecurity concerns, yet it has gone undertheorized. This book is
the first to bring the concept of animacy together with queer of color
scholarship, critical animal studies, and disability theory.
It is a generative asset that the word animacy, much like other criti-
cal terms, bears no single standard definition. Animacy—or we might
rather say, the set of notions characterized by family resemblances—
has been described variously as a quality of agency, awareness, mo-
bility, and liveness.3 In the last few decades, animacy has become a
widely debated term within linguistics, and it is in fact within linguis-
tics that animacy has been most extensively developed and applied. A
pathbreaking work written in 1976 by the linguistic anthropologist
Michael Silverstein suggested that “animacy hierarchies” were an im-
portant area of intersection between meaning and grammar, on the
basis of evidence that spanned many languages.4 Within linguistics
today, animacy most generally refers to the grammatical effects of
the sentience or liveness of nouns, but this ostensibly simple meaning
opens into much wider conversations.
How does animacy work linguistically? To take one popular ex-
ample involving relative clauses, consider the phrase “the hikers that
rocks crush”: what does this mean?5 The difficulty frequently experi-
enced by English speakers in processing this phrase has much to do
with the inanimacy of the rock (which plays an agent role in relation
to the verb crush) as compared to the animacy of the hikers, who in this
scenario play an object role. “The hikers that rocks crush” thus vio-
lates a cross-­linguistic preference among speakers. They tend to pre-
fer animate head nouns to go with subject-­extracted relative clauses
(the hikers who __ crushed the rock), or inanimate head nouns to go with
object-­extracted relative clauses (the rock that the hiker crushed __). Add

2
 Animating Animacy

to this that there is a smaller plausibility that rocks will agentively

crush hikers than that hikers will agentively crush rocks: a conceptual
order of things, an animate hierarchy of possible acts, begins to take
shape. Yet more contentious examples belie the apparent obvious-
ness of this hierarchy, and even in this case, it is within a specific cos-
mology that stones so obviously lack agency or could be the source of
causality. What if nonhuman animals, or humans stereotyped as pas-
sive, such as people with cognitive or physical disabilities, enter the
calculus of animacy: what happens then?
Using animacy as a central construct, rather than, say, “life” or “live-
liness”—though these remain a critical part of the conversation in
this book—helps us theorize current anxieties around the produc-
tion of humanness in contemporary times, particularly with regard to
humanity’s partners in definitional crime: animality (as its analogue
or limit), nationality, race, security, environment, and sexuality. Ani-
macy activates new theoretical formations that trouble and undo stub-
born binary systems of difference, including dynamism/stasis, life/
death, subject/object, speech/nonspeech, human/animal, natural
body/cyborg. In its more sensitive figurations, animacy has the ca-
pacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy, engendering different com-
munalisms and revising biopolitical spheres, or, at least, how we might
theorize them.
Interestingly, in most English language dictionaries, including
Merriam-­Webster’s and the Oxford English Dictionary (oed ), the word
animacy does not appear, though the related adjective animate does.
The related senses of animate (ppl., adj., n.) found in the oed—of
which only the adjective remains contemporary—are denoted as
having the following Latin etymology: “ad. L. animātus filled with
life, also, disposed, inclined, f. animāre to breathe, to quicken; f. anima
air, breath, life, soul, mind.” As an adjective, animate means “endowed
with life, living, alive”; “lively, having the full activity of life”; “per-
taining to what is endowed with life; connected to animals”; and “de-
noting living beings.” Animus, on the other hand, derives from the
Latin, meaning “(1) soul, (2) mind, (3) mental impulse, disposition,
passion,” and is defined as “actuating feeling, disposition in a particu-
lar direction, animating spirit or temper, usually of a hostile character;
hence, animosity.” We might find in this lexical soup some tentative
significations pertaining to materialization, negativity, passion, live-
ness, and a possible trace of quickened breath. Between these two, ani-

3
 Introduction

mate and animus, is a richly affective territory of mediation between

life and death, positivity and negativity, impulse and substance; it
might be where we could imagine the territory of animacy to reside.
As I argue, animacy is much more than the state of being animate, and
it is precisely the absence of a consensus around its meaning that leaves
it open to both inquiry and resignification.

Construals of Life and Death

Concepts related to animacy have long shadowed Western philosophi-
cal discussions: Aristotle’s De Anima, subtly presaging the present-­day
debates about the precise status of animals and things, proposed that
“soul” could be an animating principle for humans, animals, and vege-
tables, but not “dead” matter such as stones (or hypothetical rocks that
crush hikers).6 There are many implications in this work; not only
did Aristotle provocatively include “animal” as a possessor of soul, he
proposed the blending of two disciplines of thought, psychology and
biology (to the extent they were then segregated). Though it is be-
yond the intent of this book to wholly revive Aristotle, it is compel-
ling nonetheless to recall the outlines of his image of the “soul” as a
suggestive invitation to think contemporarily of “soul” as an “animat-
ing principle” rather than the proverbial “spark of life” ignited by a set
of strictly biological processes, such as dna.
It is further compelling to understand that such an animating prin-
ciple avowedly refused a priori divisions between mind and body, the
philosophical legacy of Descartes which today remains cumbrous to
scholars of material agency. Michael Frede has explained that “the
notion of the soul attacked by Aristotle is the historical ancestor of
Descartes’s notion of the mind: a Platonist notion of the soul freed of
the role to have to animate a body.”7 We might therefore say, if we
took Aristotle to one end point, that it is possible to conceive of some-
thing like the “affect” of a vegetable, wherein both the vegetable’s re-
ceptivity to other affects and its ability to affect outside of itself, as
well as its own animating principle, its capacity to animate itself, be-
come viable considerations.
I note, too, that Aristotle’s exclusion of stones itself rubs up against
other long-­standing beliefs according to which stones are animate or
potentially animate; his ontological dismissal anticipates the affective
economies of current Western ontologies that are dominant, in which

4
 Animating Animacy

stones might as well be nothing. Carolyn Dean usefully observes that

“Western tradition does not generally recognize a ‘continuum of ani-
macy.’ . . . Denying the constant (though imperceptible) changeability
of rocks, Western thought has most often identified stone as the bi-
nary opposite of, rather than a complement to, things recognized as
animate.”8 While in my own perusing of linguistic theory and phi-
losophy of language I have certainly seen prolific examples of stones
as “bad” verbal subjects, I will insist in this book that stones and other
inanimates definitively occupy a scalar position (near zero) on the ani-
macy hierarchy and that they are not excluded from it altogether and
are not only treated as animacy’s binary opposite.
New materialisms are bringing back the inanimate into the fold of
Aristotle’s animating principle, insisting that things generate multi-
plicities of meanings while they retain their “gritty materiality,” to
use Lorraine Daston’s phrase.9 The history of objects is a combination
of intuitive phenomenologically acquired abstractions and socially ac-
quired histories of knowledge about what constitutes proper “thing-
ness.”10 Throughout the humanities and social sciences, scholars are
working through posthumanist understandings of the significance
of stuff, objects, commodities, and things, creating a fertile terrain
of thought about object life; this work asserts that “foregrounding
material factors and reconfiguring our very understanding of matter
are prerequisites for any plausible account of coexistence and its con-
ditions in the twenty-­first century.”11 At the forefront of this field,
Jane Bennett, in her book Vibrant Matter, extends affect to nonhuman
bodies, organic or inorganic, averring that affect is part and parcel, not
an additive component, of bodies’ materiality.12 This book builds on
these insights by digging into animacy as a specific kind of affective
and material construct that is not only nonneutral in relation to ani-
mals, humans, and living and dead things, but is shaped by race and
sexuality, mapping various biopolitical realizations of animacy in the
contemporary culture of the United States.
Recent critical theory has considered the believed-­to-­be-­g iven
material world as more than provisionally constituted, illusorily
bounded, and falsely segregated to the realm of the subjective. Such
work includes, for instance, Donna Haraway’s feminist dismantling of
the binary of nature and culture in terms of “naturecultures,” Bruno
Latour’s “hybrids,” Karen Barad’s agential realism, and Deleuze and
Guattari’s “assemblages” of objects and affects.13 Thinking twice about

5
 Introduction

such givens means that we might further reconceive how matter

might contribute to the ongoing discussions about the conceptual,
cultural, and political economies of life and death. That is, what are
the creditable bodies of import, those bodies whose lives or deaths
are even in the field of discussion? If we should rethink such bodies—
and I argue that we should—then how might we think differently if
nonhuman animals (whom both Haraway and Latour point out have
been ostensibly, but in fact not neatly, bracketed into “nature,” de-
spite already being hybrids) and even inanimate objects were to inch
into the biopolitical fold? Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital, for instance,
reads biopolitics as having been theorized only in relation to human
life, arguing that, in fact, “discourses and technologies of biopower
hinge on the species divide.”14
If contemporary biopolitics is already troubling the living with the
dead, this book, in a way, continues to crash the party with protago-
nists which hail from animal studies (monkeys) and science studies
(pollutant molecules), bringing humanism’s dirt back into today’s al-
ready messy biopolitical imbroglio. Nevertheless, there are important
consequences within concepts of life and death for race and sexuality
politics. Recently, Jasbir Puar has revisited questions of life and death
while working along the lines of what she calls a “bio-­necro” political
analysis which “conceptually acknowledges [Foucauldian] biopower’s
direct activity in death, while remaining bound to the optimization
of life, and [Mbembe’s] necropolitics’ nonchalance toward death even
as it seeks out killing as a primary aim.”15 In this, she provides potent
revising of the place of new homonormativities in geopolitical nego-
tiations of biopolitics. Indeed, the givens of death are already racial-
ized, sexualized, and, as I will argue, animated in specific biopolitical
formations.
Since biopower as described by Michel Foucault is thought in two
ways—at the level of government, and at the level of individual
(human) subjects—how inanimate objects and nonhuman animals
participate in the regimes of life (making live) and coerced death (kill-
ing) are integral to the effort to understand how biopower works and
what its materials are.16 I am drawn to the potent claims and articula-
tions of biopolitics, given their extraordinary relevance to concerns
with sexuality, illness, and racial “matters.” Because of a lingering
Eurocentrism within what is thought of as biopolitics—its implicit
restriction to national bodies, for instance, as well as its species-­

6
 Animating Animacy

centric bias that privileges discussions about human citizens—there

are productive openings for transnational race, animal, and sexuality
scholarship. This contested terrain also opens up new ways of think-
ing racially and sexually about biopolitics, particularly around govern-
mentality, definitions of population, health regimes, and deathly life.
What biopolitical story, for instance, could a discussion of enlivened
toxins like transnational lead, their effectivity and affectivity in young
white bodies, and their displacement of deathly black and contagious
Asian bodies tell? At the least, a consideration of the animation of
otherwise “dead” lead and its downstream effects and affects chal-
lenges and extends given notions of governmentality, health, and race
beyond a national framework.
The anima, animus, animal, and animate are, I argue, not vagaries or
templatic zones of undifferentiated matter, but in fact work as com-
plexly racialized and indeed humanized notions. I also highlight what
linguistic semantics has done with this concept and bring some of its
productive peculiarities (such as the seemingly circular relation be-
tween life and death) into conversation with animacy’s contempo-
rary theoretical questions. If language normally and habitually dis-
tinguishes human and inhuman, live and dead, but then in certain
circumstances wholly fails to do so, what might this tell us about the
porosity of biopolitical logics themselves?

Animate Currents
The stakes of revisiting animacy are real and immediate, particularly
as the coherence of “the body” is continually contested. What, for
instance, is the line between the fetus (often categorized as “not yet
living”) and a rights-­bearing infant-­subject? How are those in persis-
tent vegetative states deemed to be at, near, or beyond the threshold
of death? Environmental toxicity and environmental degradation are
figured as slow and dreadful threats to flesh, mind, home, and state.
Myths of immunity are challenged, and sometimes dismantled, by
transnationally figured communicable diseases, some of them appar-
ently borne by nonhuman animals. Healthful or bodily recuperation
looks to sophisticated prosthetic instruments, synthetic drugs, and
nanotechnologies, yet such potent modifications potentially come
with a mourning of the loss of purity and a concomitant expulsion of
bodies marked as unworthy of such “repair.”

7
 Introduction

Theoretically, too, the body’s former fictions of integrity, au-

tonomy, heterosexual alignment and containment, and wellness give
way to critiques from discourse studies, performance studies, affect
theory, medical anthropology, and disability theory. In view of such
relevant breadth of disciplinary engagement, this book is indebted to,
and thinks variously in terms of, philosophical considerations of life,
care, and molecularity; linguistics considerations of the sociocritical
pulses that radiate out from specific kinds of speech; security studies
questions about how threats are articulated and ontologized; and ani-
mal studies questions about the links between animals or animalized
humans and the human questions they are summoned to figuratively
answer.
Among linguists, animacy’s definition is unfixed (and, in standard
dictionaries, absent). The cognitive linguist Mutsumi Yamamoto de-
scribes it as follows:
The concept of “animacy” can be regarded as some kind of assumed
cognitive scale extending from human through animal to inanimate.
In addition to the life concept itself, concepts related to the life con-
cept—such as locomotion, sentiency, etc.—can also be incorporated
into the cognitive domain of “animacy.” . . . A common reflection
of “animacy” in a language is a distinction between animate and in-
animate, and analogically between human and non-­human in some
measure. However, animacy is not simply a matter of the semantic
feature [+-­alive], and its linguistic manifestation is somewhat com-
plicated. Our cognition of animacy and the extent to which we in-
vest a certain body (or body of entities) with humanness or animate-
ness influence various levels of human language a great deal.17
By writing that animacy “invest[s] a certain body . . . with humanness
or animateness,” she implicitly rejects the idea that there is a fixed as-
signment of animate values to things-­in-­the-­world that is consistently
reflected in our language, taking instead the cognitivist approach that
the world around us animates according to what we humans make
of it.
But Yamamoto also remarks on the complicity of some linguists
with the apparent anthropocentricity of a hierarchical ordering of
types of entities that positions humans at the top. She makes an obser-
vation regarding John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
written in 1694: “Locke argued that the identity of one animal or plant

8
 Animating Animacy

(‘vegetable’ in his word) lies in maintaining one and the same life,
whilst the identity of one person is maintained through one and the
same (continuous) consciousness. . . . [H]owever, how can it be proved
that [one animal or plant] does not possess one continuous conscious-
ness throughout its life, as a human being does?”18 Here, Yamamoto
clearly supports a broad definition of consciousness that seems quite
in keeping with Aristotle’s notion of animating principle, or “soul.” In
this book, I further the productive skepticism inherent in Yamamoto’s
more radical take on animacy, and move beyond the realm of linguis-
tics to consider how animacy is implicated in political questions of
power and the recognition of different subjects, as well as ostensible
objects.
Animacy is conceptually slippery, even to its experts. In 2005, Rad-
boud University in the Netherlands held an international linguistics
workshop on animacy, noting that it both “surfaces in the grammar”
and “plays a role in the background” and proposing that participants
finally “pin down the importance of animacy in languages and gram-
mar.”19 In the concluding words to her book, Yamamoto shifts away
from analyzing data to appeal to the language of mysticism: “it is of
significant interest to linguists to capture the extra-­linguistic frame-
work of the animacy concept, because, as it were, this concept is a
spell which strongly influences our mind in the process of language use and
a keystone which draws together miscellaneous structural and prag-
matic factors across a wide range of languages in the world.”20 Ani-
macy seems almost to flutter away from the proper grasp of linguistics,
refusing to be “pinned down.”
Thus, the very animate quality of the term itself is useful, not least
because it has the potential to move among disciplines. Taking the
flux of these animacies into account as I theorize various connectivi-
ties (for instance, subjects and their environments, queers and their
kin, couches and their occupants, lives and their biopolitical forma-
tions), Animacies uncovers implicit mediations of human and inhuman
in the transnationally conceived United States, not least through cul-
tural, environmental, and political exchanges within and between the
United States and Asia. I pace animacy through several different do-
mains, including language and subjectivity; selected twentieth- and
twenty-­first-­century film, popular culture, and visual media regard-
ing racialized and queer animality; and contemporary environmental
illness. Through these case studies, the book develops the idea of ani-

9
 Introduction

macy as an often racialized and sexualized means of conceptual and

affective mediation between human and inhuman, animate and inani-
mate, whether in language, rhetoric, or imagery.
I argue that animacy is especially current—and carries with it a kind
of charge—given that environmental threats (even those that are ap-
parently invisible) such as polluted air, poisoned food, and harmful
materials are constantly being figured within contemporary culture
in the United States. These purportedly unseen threats demand such
figuration, yet also escape direct depiction and are usually represented
associatively, in terms of animation, personification, nationalization,
integrity, and immunity, as well as in relation to other threats. Anima-
cies makes critical links between popular knowledges of environmen-
tal entities (which often gather around a few select objects of height-
ened concern) and the larger sociopolitical environments in which
they are seated. This book builds on environmental justice work that
tracks the subjects and objects of industrial capital and environmental-
ist movements that examine the implicit or explicit raced and classed
components of toxic threats.21 Yet I also inquire into the imputations
of toxicity as an animated, active, and peculiarly queer agent.
Furthermore, political interest stokes public alarm toward “toxins.”
We must therefore understand the ways in which toxicity has been
so enthusiastically taken up during times of economic instability and
panic about transnational flow. Animacies demonstrates that interests
in toxicity are particularly (if sometimes stealthily) raced and queered.
Indeed, toxins participate vividly in the racial mattering of locations,
human and nonhuman bodies, living and inert entities, and events
such as disease threats. This book aims to offer ways of mapping and
diagnosing the mutual imbrications of race, sexuality, ability, environ-
ment, and sovereign concern.
In addition, animal and science studies have offered tools through
which we can rethink the significance of molecular, cellular, animal,
vegetable, or nonhuman life.22 Animacies not only takes into account
the broadening field of nonhuman life as a proper object, but even
more sensitively, the animateness or inanimateness of entities that are
considered either “live” or “dead.” Considering differential animacies
becomes a particularly critical matter when “life” versus “death” bi-
nary oppositions fail to capture the affectively embodied ways that
racializations of specific groups are differentially rendered. Sianne
Ngai explores the affective meanings of the term animatedness, focus-

10
 Animating Animacy

ing on its manifestation as a property of Asianness and of blackness:

“the affective state of being ‘animated’ seems to imply the most basic
or minimal of all affective conditions: that of being, in one way or
another, ‘moved.’ But, as we press harder on the affective meanings of
animatedness, we shall see how the seemingly neutral state of ‘being
moved’ becomes twisted into the image of the overemotional racial-
ized subject.”23 Animacy has consequences for both able-­bodiedness
and ability, especially since a consideration of “inanimate life” imbues
the discourses around environmental illness and toxicity. For instance,
the constant interabsorption of animate and inanimate bodies in the
case of airborne pollution must account for the physical nonintegrity
of individual bodies and the merging of forms of “life” and “nonlife.”
This book seeks to trouble this binary of life and nonlife as it offers
a different way to conceive of relationality and intersubjective ex-
change.
I detail an animacy that is in indirect conversation with historical
vitalisms as well as Bennett’s “vital materiality.”24 Yet this book focuses
critically on an interest in the animal that hides in animacy, particu-
larly in the interest of its attachment to things like sex, race, class, and
dirt. That is, my purpose is not to reinvest certain materialities with
life, but to remap live and dead zones away from those very terms,
leveraging animacy toward a consideration of affect in its queered
and raced formations. Throughout the book, my core sense of “queer”
refers, as might be expected, to exceptions to the conventional order-
ing of sex, reproduction, and intimacy, though it at times also refers
to animacy’s veering-­away from dominant ontologies and the norma-
tivities they promulgate. That is, I suggest that queering is immanent
to animate transgressions, violating proper intimacies (including be-
tween humans and nonhuman things).
For the purposes of this book, I define affect without necessary
restriction, that is, I include the notion that affect is something not
necessarily corporeal and that it potentially engages many bodies at
once, rather than (only) being contained as an emotion within a single
body. Affect inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected. Yet I am
also interested in the relatively subjective, individually held “emo-
tion” or “feeling.” While I prioritize the former, I also attend to the
latter (with cautions about its true possessibility) precisely because, in
the case of environmental illness or multiple chemical sensitivity, the
entry of an exterior object not only influences the further affectivity

11
 Introduction

of an intoxicated human body, but “emotions” that body: it lends it

particular emotions or feelings as against others. I take my cue from
Sara Ahmed’s notion of “affective economies,” in which specific emo-
tions play roles in binding subjects and objects. She writes, “emotions
involve subjects and objects, but without residing positively within
them. Indeed, emotions may seem like a force of residence as an effect
of a certain history, a history that may operate by concealing its own
traces.”25 The traces I examine in this book are those of animate hier-
archies. If affect includes affectivity—how one body affects another—
then affect, in this book, becomes a study of the governmentality of
animate hierarchies, an examination of how acts seem to operate with,
or against, the order of things (to appropriate Foucault’s phrasing for
different purposes).26
Queer theory, building upon feminism’s critique of gender differ-
ence, has been at the forefront of recalibrating many categories of
difference, and it has further rewritten how we understand affect,
especially with regard to trauma, death, mourning, shame, loss, im-
possibility, and intimacy (not least because of the impact of the hiv/
aids crisis); key thinkers here include Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Ber-
lant, Heather Love, and Lee Edelman, among others.27 As will be dem-
onstrated, these are all terms that intersect in productive ways with
animacy. Thus, this book fixes particular attention on queer theoretical
questions of intimacy, sexuality, and connectivity; critical race work
on the flexible zones of extension of race, the ways that raciality cir-
culates transnationally, and the intersections of race and environment;
the staging of animals to displace racial and sexual questions; disability
studies questions about toxicity and recuperation; environmental jus-
tice connections between environmentally condemned marginalized
communities and the toxins conferred upon them; and queer of color
mappings of race and sexuality in “unlikely” places.

How the Chapters Move

The book is organized into three parts, with two chapters each:
“Words,” “Animals,” and “Metals.” These three parts each examine
and track a feature of animacy in detail, along the lines of a focus: in
“Words,” language and figural dehumanization; in “Animals,” queer
animals and animality; and in “Metals,” the toxic metal particles lead
and mercury. Each pair attempts to investigate a question about kinds

12
 Animating Animacy

of animacy, and each exhibits, or performs, the result of letting its ob-
ject animate, that is—considering that its etymological history still sur-
vives somewhere in its linguistic present—letting it breathe, gender
itself, or enact “animus” in its negativity. For instance, in the “Words”
part, the animacy of the word queer is unleashed to find new linguistic
loci; later, in “Animals,” the animal transubstantiates beyond the bor-
ders of our insistent human ontologies; and finally, toxic metals are let
loose in the bloodstream of the text to queer its own affective regard.
In this sense, each chapter, while an animation in itself, is simulta-
neously an attempt to seek a transdisciplinary method forged through
my background in cognitive linguistics and inflected by my commit-
ments to queer of color, feminist, and disability scholarship. Thus,
animacy is still identifiable, even if it leaves behind its epistemologi-
cal pinnings. If these methodological efforts may seem eccentric, my
hope is that they might, in their animate crossings and changing dis-
ciplinary intimacies, be plumbed for a certain kind of utility, particu-
larly to the extent that each is engaged in some way with questions of
race, sexuality, and disability.

Words
“Language and Mattering Humans,” the first chapter, is framed by a
consideration of language as animated, as a means of embodied con-
densation of social, cultural, and political life. Here I consider in
detail a particular political grammar, what linguists call an animacy
hierarchy, which conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, ani-
mal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value
and priority. Animacy hierarchies have broad ramifications for issues
of ecology and environment, since objects, animals, substances, and
spaces are assigned constrained zones of possibility and agency by ex-
tant grammars of animacy. The chapter examines a seemingly excep-
tional form of linguistic usage to think through gradations of animacy
and objectification: the insult, a move of representational injury that
implicates language as capable of incurring damage. Linguistic insults
vividly demonstrate that language acts to contain and order many
kinds of matter, including lifeless matter; they also show that language
users are “animate theorists” insofar as they deploy and rework such
orders of matter. Furthermore, insults that refer to humans as abjected
matter or as less than human—for instance, Senator George Allen’s in-

13
 Introduction

famous “macaca” utterance from 2006—cannily assert human status

as a requisite condition for securing nonhuman comparators, thereby
rendering the idea of “dehumanization” paradoxical.
Chapter 2, “Queer Animation,” then asks: if language helps to
coerce certain figures into nonbeing, or to demote on an animacy
hierarchy, then what are the modes of revival, return, or rejoinder?
One popular social strategy has been to “reclaim” distressed objects as
a move toward political agency, sometimes literalized in a discredited
social label. Both subtle and explicit de-­animations, therefore, may be
responded to with plays at re-­animation through linguistic reclaim-
ing acts, not least with the act of speech itself, and I investigate this
possibility by giving special consideration to the scholarly and politi-
cal uptake of an identity reference and theoretical entity called queer,
a term that seems semantically predestined to launch its own anima-
tions. Analyzing queer’s multiple senses with cognitive linguistics, I
show how two conceptual forms emerged with two lexicalized forms,
verb and noun: a re-­animated queer verb and a de-­animated queer
noun, which open it to some critiques that queer politics have made
the “wrong” turn to essentialization and identity politics. I suggest
that Foucault’s governmentality might be revisited in the linguistic
notion of governance, especially concerning its sensitivity to the ani-
macy hierarchy.

Animals
In chapter 3, “Queer Animality,” I consider animality as a condensation
of racialized animacy, taking up inquiries relating to the paradoxical
morbidities and vibrancies of the queer figure and its potentiality for
nonnormative subject formations. I locate queerness, in this chapter,
in both wrong marriage and improper intimacy. Using performativity
as a point of departure for a theoretical kinship frequently found be-
tween queerness and animality, I examine a signal argument in the
work of the language philosopher J. L. Austin. Austin set up the ex-
ample of a failed pronouncement of marriage: in this case, nonautho-
rized official speech by evoking “a marriage with a monkey.” Here I
read the “exemplary ridiculousness” of Austin’s example as indicating
a wider anxiety about the legitimacy of exchange between properly
animated figures, teasing apart the combined intimations of sexual
oddity with racial nonwhiteness and figural blackness. Moving then

14
 Animating Animacy

to a selection of visual media from the turn of the twentieth century, I

assess the role that queerness, miscegenation, and comparative racisms
play in rendering some bodies less animate, even when affective inten-
sities surround them. Closely attending to this visual culture, I exam-
ine how controversies around citizenship in the United States at this
time were displaced onto the figure of the “dumb” animal, which was
both raced and sexed for rhetorical effect.
In chapter 4, “Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation,” I ask what
happens when the matter of gender, race, and sexuality itself shifts,
either in our diagnostic ontologies or in its own figural actuality. I
begin with biopolitical questions of animal—and human—­neutering,
asking how gender and family are queered in both normative and ex-
ceptional ways; here, I use “queer” to indicate challenges to the nor-
mativity of sex (sexing) that are sometimes biopolitically authorized.
I then turn to an odd yet pervasive omission in cultural animal rep-
resentations—that of the missing morphology of the genitalia—­
suggesting that such a phenomenon could, instead of being seen as
a trivial or expected circumstance, be thought in relation to the cul-
tural production of animals. I ask what this missing morphology ani-
mates, whether due to notions of propriety; to the idea that skin and
fur are treated as essentially sartorial, displacing but confirming an in-
terior human; or to an attempt at symbolic neutering (since animals
often serve as stand-­ins for rampant sexuality) or transing. Questions
of transgendering are put into conversation with this omission to ask
after the valence of this kind of queer affectivity.

Metals
Turning to allegedly insensate—but nevertheless potent—particles,
chapter 5, “Lead’s Racial Matters,” considers the Chinese lead toys
panic in the United States in 2007 and its representation in mainstream
media. Here, animacy becomes a property of lead, a highly mobile
and poisonous substance that feeds anxieties about transgressors of
permeable borders, whether of skin or country. The chapter traces
the physical travels (animations) of lead as an industrial by-­product,
while simultaneously observing lead’s critical role in the representa-
tion of national security concerns, interests in sovereignty, and racial
and bodily integrity in the United States. I argue that the lead painted
onto children’s toys was animated and racialized as Chinese, whereas

15
 Introduction

its potential victims were depicted as largely white. In the context

of the interests of the United States, the phrase Chinese lead is consis-
tently rendered not as a banal industrial product, but as an exogenous
toxin painted onto the toys of innocent American children, and as
the backhanded threat of a previously innocent boon of transnational
labor whose exploitive realities are beginning to dawn on the popu-
lar subconscious of the United States. This lead scare shifted both its
mythic origins and its mythic targets, effectively replacing domestic
concerns about black and impoverished children and their exposures
to environmental lead.
Finally, chapter 6, “Following Mercurial Affect,” shifts the book’s
perspective from a theoretical examination of animacy to the bio-
political impact of environmental toxins on human bodies in the con-
text of present-­day emergent illnesses. Here the term animacy takes
mobile, molecular form, as particles that both intoxicate a body into
environmental illness and as particles that constantly threaten that
body’s fragile state. The chapter considers the ways in which environ-
mental illness restages expected forms of sociality, rendering them
as queer, disordered proximities in the case of molecular intimacies
and orientations. Such altered sociality also evinces in the case of the
often-­different geographies of affective ties to animate and inanimate
objects exhibited in autism (which in some views symptomatically
overlap with environmental factors, rather than being determined by
them). Such forms of sociality have the potential to trouble the alter-
native socialities offered by queer theory, as well as the thematics of
negativity that recent queer theory takes up as a political question.
I conclude with an afterword, “The Spill and the Sea.” It opens by
pairing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010 and the “kill-
ing” language summoned to commemorate its technological reso-
lution with an unlikely partner: the human-­wannabe-­fish protago-
nist of the animated Hayao Miyazaki film Ponyo, released in 2008.
These two different phenomena come together as an indication of
the questions that continue to be raised by the affective politics sur-
rounding both animate and inanimate things. Miyazaki’s cosmology
is imbued, I argue, with unexpected affectivity, which is part of his
animation’s magic. I end with a plea to revisit the possibility of “care”
across the realm of animacy, considering it as a means of unlikely
cross-­affiliation, a politics that wanders in and out of mainstreams.

16
 Animating Animacy

Disciplinary Animation, Shifting Archive

Fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature, Animacies traverses a num-
ber of intersecting fields. First, it comes out of, but is by no means
limited to, my training as a queer feminist linguist with a heightened
sensitivity to the political and disciplinary mobility of terms. My argu-
ment tracks how the notion of animacy implicitly figures within and
reorients a range of theoretical constructions, from disability studies
with its focus on redefining given conditions of bodily and mental
life; to queer theory’s considerations of feeling, sex, and death; to bio-
security studies with its mapping of the character of national obses-
sions about terrorism, ingestion, transmission, and infection. I build
on the feminist insight that “nature” is a feminized counterpoint to
masculinized “culture,” but also approach “nature” as a complexly dif-
ferentiated site, gendered, racialized, and sexualized in ways that are
not consistent or predictable.28 And in view of the place that a hetero-
normatively textured sovereignty takes in the national anxieties of the
United States about disability and illness, such as the lead toy panic, it
is instructive to turn to both disability theory and queer theory in the
consideration of environmental illness. Here I am indebted to queer-­
disability theorists such as Eli Clare and Robert McRuer.29
I want to affirm, study, and reflect upon the monkey whose mar-
riage to a human Austin dismissively refers to as a mockery in chap-
ter 3, for this queer, potentially racialized, invalid marriage has much
to say. That is, nonlife as life, and monkey as legitimate marrying sub-
ject, materialize, replenish, and trouble ideologies, sentiments, and
ontologies of race, humanness, and security. I reside in this so-­called
negative zone, one of abjection, racial marking, toxic queerness, and
illness, to think about the epistemic riches of possibility within. If this
is not a recuperative project, it is nevertheless an affirmative one.
Thinking through the fluidities of either “life” or “death” that seem
to run across borders of animate and inanimate, and through orders of
state preference that (in large part due to the commodifying and vir-
tualizing and abstracting processes of capitalism) disregard common
understandings of “life” or “liveliness,” I follow connectivities that
animate before me, without a fore-­g iven attachment to a “proper”
or “consistent” object. The chapters of this book therefore interani-
mate, rather than organizing fully and completely with regard to one
another.

17
 Introduction

Furthermore, Animacies steps out of and around disciplinary closure,

particularly since my objects of concern seem to call for movement.
Thus, I shift weight between interdisciplinary stresses of analysis,
from linguistic to literary to phenomenological, alternately focus-
ing on close readings of films, illustration, archival research, linguistic
evidence, newspaper accounts, and popular media coverage. The con-
cluding chapter, framed by personal narrative, performs a provocative
and pointedly intimate invocation to rethink animacy in the reader’s
own terms.
Finally, a word about my shifting archive. This book uses several
lenses to explore the rangy, somewhat unruly construct called ani-
macy. In my view, a somewhat “feral” approach to disciplinarity natu-
rally changes the identity of what might be the proper archives for
one’s scholarship. Nonetheless, my research is grounded in twentieth-
and twenty-­first-­century cultural productions, ones that are often
framed within transnational encounters between the United States
and Asia, from Fu Manchu to the contemporary Chinese artist Xu
Bing. As I shift from discussions of dehumanizing language (linguis-
tics?) to animal genitality (cultural studies?) to health discourse (sci-
ence studies?) to (in)human and queer sociality (queer theory?), it is
my intention and design that the archives themselves feralize, giving
up any idealization about their domestication, refusing to answer
whether they constitute proper or complete coverage. At the same
time, I take care to contextualize (whether temporally or geopoliti-
cally) the “thing” under discussion, since I have no interest in running
roughshod over historical particularity.
Thinking and moving ferally constitutes a risk, both to the borders
of disciplinarity and to the author who is metonymically feralized
along with the text. Yet it is arguably also a necessary condition of
examining animacy within disability, postcolonial, and queer studies.
I venture, as well, that as surely as intersectionality “matters” lives
and nonlives, animacy might ask of queer of color analysis, and other
modes of analysis that rely upon intersectionality, that the seeming
givens thought to centrally inform race, sexuality, and gender might
bear further examination—that is, that animacy tugs the categories of
race and sexuality out of their own homes. I refer to Roderick Fergu-
son’s useful discussion of queer of color critique’s potential to counter
the obliquely intersecting racialization, gendering, sexualization, and
classing that exist within national spaces. Notably, Ferguson describes

18
 Animating Animacy

queer of color critique itself as “a heterogeneous enterprise made up

of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist
theory, and queer critique.”30
I use the word feral in direct conversation with the disability schol-
ars Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell, who ask about the location of
disability theory within disciplinary formations: “Is it possible to keep
the freshness—the insight-­driven ‘wildness’—of the field in the midst
of seeking a home base in the academy? Can disability studies sustain
its productive ‘feral’ nature without being reduced to a lesser form of
academic evolutionism or thoroughly domesticated as an academic
endeavor?”31
The notion of feral also brings up ambivalent identifications with
antihomes, since it both rejects the domicile and reinvigorates a
notion of public shelter. As a moving target, the sign of the feral also
invokes diaspora and its potential to naturalize nationalisms and capi-
talist geopolitics. Gayatri Gopinath’s work on queer South Asian pub-
lic cultures is useful here; Gopinath, reflecting on diaspora’s simplest
definition as “the dispersal and movement of populations from one
particular national or geographic location to other disparate sites,”
provokes us to closely examine valences of queer “home” that inter-
rupt and trouble diaspora’s “dependence on a genealogical, implicitly
heteronormative reproductive logic.”32 Indeed, the ambivalently
homed feral figure also appears in my text as the sign of a biopolitical
(nationalized) demand for population control.
I choose instead, here, to allow for the impression of a certain sur-
feit, and simultaneously to refuse to categorize humans, animals, ob-
jects as so very cleanly distinct from one another. To do this is to hope
for a certain “wiliness” of the sort performed by the writer and queer
critic Silviano Santiago, who in his essay “The Wily Homosexual” an-
swers the implicit request posed by Western white queer conference-­
goers to provide “native” Brazilian knowledge by responding both
vertically (as expected) and horizontally. That horizontality, which
Santiago describes as a “supplement” rather than a clumsy inversion
of the hierarchy of values implicit in the question, can be described
as “elusive” only from an insistently typological drive to closure and
hence leaves a certain trace of mystery and escape in the path of his
text.33 My hope is for that opening, insofar as it can be found in this
book, to be inviting and productive. Animacy, after all, is an unstable
terrain; this means that (and it is my belief that) its archives are not

19
 Introduction

“pinnable.” The various archives, which seem at first to be distinct, are

surprisingly very much in conversation with each other and, beyond
my attempts to “interarticulate” these connections, ring with one an-
other’s strange vitality.
As many scholars of illness have remarked, “living through illness”
seems, at least at first, to confound the narrativized, temporalized
imaginary of “one’s human life,” for it can constitute an undesired
stopping point that is sporadically animated by frenzied attempts (to
the extent one’s energy permits) to resolve the abrupt transformations
of illness that often feel in some way “against life.” Some transforma-
tions suggest a suspension of time (productivity time, social time),
and some involve the wearing of a deathly pallor or other visible regis-
ters of morbidity.34 But for those with the privileges of food, care, and
physical support, this pause can also become a meditation (if forced)
on the conditions that underlie both illness and wellness, that is, the
biopoliticized animacies that foretell what may become of a changing
body, human or not, living or nonliving. For this, I am grateful for
the pause that, even if it took me “out of life,” gave me the matter that
could animate this book.

20
Part I * Words
 1
Language and Mattering Humans

This chapter aims to recover the alchemical magic of language,

whether benevolent or vicious, by demonstrating explicit ways that
it animates humans, animals, and things in between. I suggest that
this can be done in collusion with existing registers of citizenship,
race, sex, ability, and sexuality, depending on the recurrent materi-
alizations of iterative power; and it might possibly be done without
abandoning the nonhuman animal to the realm of the nonlinguistic
(as dominant hierarchies foretell). Language’s fundamental means, I
suggest, is something called animacy, a concept most deeply explored
in cognitive linguistics.
In what follows, I sketch a brief history of the study of animacy
within linguistics, as I range beyond the borders of that discipline
to think through how de-­animation (by way of objectification) also
proceeds through and within speech. I go directly to linguistics and
ask after its own devices, beginning with the moment in anthropo-
logical linguistics where animacy hierarchies first appeared. Then I
provisionally deploy a specific framework from the subfield of cog-
nitive linguistics, insisting on the generally untold stories of concep-
tual mattering and materiality that lie there. I then turn to questions
of objectification that have long circulated in critical race, feminist,
and disability theory; for while, as I will demonstrate, objectification
is a preeminent kind of mattering, its linguistic instance is far from a
self-­evident process. I pay special attention to how the “animal” is re-
 Chapter One

lentlessly recruited as the presumed field of rejection of and for the

“human.”

Introducing Animacy
For linguists, animacy is the quality of liveness, sentience, or human-
ness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic,
consequences. Bernard Comrie calls animacy an “extralinguistic con-
ceptual property” that manifests in “a range of formally quite different
ways . . . in the structure of different languages.”1 Despite animacy’s
apparently extralinguistic character, however, it pushes forward again
and again: Comrie explains that “the reason why animacy is of lin-
guistic relevance is because essentially the same kinds of conceptual
distinction are found to be of structural relevance across a wide range
of languages.”2
Mutsumi Yamamoto notes that, by necessity, no treatment of ani-
macy can be limited to the linguistic, for animacy lies within and
without. While animacy does not behave in a regular fashion in re-
lation to language structures, it retains a consistent cross-­linguistic
significance that no other concept seems to address: “the same kind of
conceptual distinction seems to be working as a dominant force in
various different structural and pragmatic factors across a wide variety
of languages in the world.”3 Furthermore, Comrie notes that even if
animacy is not apparently structurally encoded in a language, it can
influence the direction of language change, as in the case of Slavonic
languages.4 Even if language is in some sense tuned to animacy, ani-
macy is clearly not obligated to it. Does animacy slip out of language’s
bounds, or does language slip out of animacy’s bounds? In this book,
the slippage of animacy in relation to its successive co-­conspirators
will be a repeating, and in my view most productive, refrain.
Many scholars credit animacy’s first serious appearance in linguistics
to Michael Silverstein’s idea of an “animacy hierarchy,” which appears
in a comparative study of indigenous North American Chinookan,
Australian Dyirbal, and other indigenous Australian languages pub-
lished in 1976.5 While most understandings of animacy today depart
from Silverstein’s binary-­features account and his focus on finding an
explanation for ergative languages, largely in first, second, and third
personhood, his initial insights and formulations maintain relevance
today in their close pairing of extralinguistic factors with linguistic
structure.

24
 Language and Mattering Humans

Ergative languages (such as Basque) are distinguished from accusa-

tive languages (such as Japanese and English) by how their behavior
is mapped in relation to transitive verbs (verbs that have a subject and
direct object) and intransitive verbs (verbs with only one argument, a
subject). How the subjects or objects of these two types of verbs re-
ceive “case marking,” that is, a grammatical indicator of their semantic
role in relation to the action of the verb, determines the overall lan-
guage classification. In accusative systems, the object of a transitive verb
(the lion ate me) can receive distinct marking, whereas the subject of
a transitive verb (I ate the lion) and the subject of an intransitive verb
(I panicked) are the same. In ergative systems, the subject of a transitive
verb receives ergative case marking, unlike the object of the transitive
verb or the subject of an intransitive verb. Such behavior, however,
is not entirely fixed. Many ergative languages exhibit “split” behavior
in which both ergative and accusative case markings are possible for
certain subject or object arguments; that is, certain expressions can be
rendered either way.
Silverstein explained this split by proposing a hierarchy of ani-
macy. He claimed that many similar Australian languages appeared
to show “splits of ergativity patterned with respect to a lexical hier-
archy,” locating the determining line of distinction between ergative
and accusative markings in the characteristic semantics of nouns:6
In this paper, I want to bring out the fact that “split” of case-­marking
is not random. At its most dramatic, it defines a hierarchy of what
might be called “inherent lexical content” of noun phrases, first and
second person as well as third person. This hierarchy expresses the
semantic naturalness for a lexically-­specified noun phrase to func-
tion as agent of a true transitive verb, and inversely the naturalness
of functioning as patient of such. The noun phrases at the top of
the hierarchy manifest nominative-­accusative case-­marking, while
those at the bottom manifest ergative-­absolutive case marking.
Sometimes there is a middle ground which is a three-­way system of
O-­A-­S case markings. We can define the hierarchy independent of
the facts of split ergativity by our usual notions of surface-­category
markedness.7
Silverstein observed that less animate subjects were more likely to re-
ceive special ergative marking, in a kind of communicative reassur-
ance that such types of subjects could indeed possess the agentive or
controlling capacities required to do the action provided by the verb.

25
 Chapter One

More animate subjects did not need this marking and could receive
regular nominative (unmarked) case. His observations resulted in a
suggested “hierarchy of animacy” from inanimate to third, second,
and first personhood: “So the case-­marking system here seems to ex-
press a notion of the “naturalness” or unmarked character of the vari-
ous noun phrases in different adjunct functions, particularly the tran-
sitive ones. It is most ‘natural’ in transitive constructions for first or
second person to act on third, least ‘natural’ for third to act on first
or second. Decomposed into constituent hierarchies, it is natural for
third person to function as patient (O) and for first and second persons
to function as agent (A), but not vice-­versa. The marked cases, ergative
and accusative, formally express the violations of these p­ rinciples.”8
First- and second-­person animacies, all else being equal, tend to
value higher in animacy than third-­person ones. Later studies found
that another major parameter of animacy is the individuation scale.9
More easily individuated entities than those that are massified or “in-
stances of a type” receive more animacy. Furthermore, Silverstein
noted that the hierarchy was implicational: if a borderline entity be-
haved in a certain way, then those entities below its animacy level could
not behave syntactically as if they were more animate. We can begin
to see here how racism, stereotyping, and a lack of empathy can co-­
conspire to construct deflated animacies for some humans (and, argu-
ably, some nonhuman animals) in spite of biological equivalences.
Perhaps the broadest cross-­linguistic study of animacy hierarchies
was done by John Cherry.10 Cherry’s study, representing several lan-
guage families and including Swahili, English, Navajo, Shona, Chi-
nook, Algonquian, Hopi, Russian, Polish, and Breton, yielded a sum-
mary that roughly characterizes each station (with its own hierarchical
orders) in an animacy hierarchy, and offered perhaps the most detailed
summary of its kind:
Humans:
adult > nonadult; male/MASC gender > female/FEM gender;
free > enslaved; able-­bodied > disabled; linguistically intact > pre-
linguistic/linguistically impaired; familiar (kin/named) > unfamil-
iar (nonkin/unnamed); proximate (1p & 2p pronouns) > remote (3p
pronouns).
Animals:
higher/larger animals > lower/smaller animals > insects; whole
animal > body part;

26
 Language and Mattering Humans

Inanimates:
motile/active > nonmotile/nonactive; natural > manmade; count >
mass;
Incorporeals:
abstract concepts, natural forces, states of affairs, states of being,
emotions, qualities, activities, events, time periods, institutions, re-
gions, diverse intellectual objects.11
This schema asserts that an adult male who is “free” (as opposed to en-
slaved), able-­bodied, and with intact linguistic capacities, one who is
also familiar, individual, and positioned nearby, stands at the top of
the hierarchy as the most “animate” or active agent within grammars
of ordering.12 Lower down, and hence less agentive, would be, for
example, a large, distant population of females. Lower still would be
nonhuman animals (ranked by size). Near the bottom would be some-
thing like “sadness.” Obviously, this conceptual ordering has profound
ramifications for questions of gender and sexuality, species difference,
disability, and race (though race as such is not broached on Cherry’s
list); the hierarchalizations written into these questions are explored
in the following chapters. Cherry deems these hierarchalizations so-
cially significant cognitive categories, but not others. To that extent,
his work does not begin to contend with the social, political, and
often colonial contexts that subtend these very categories. The merit
of Cherry’s work is that, for him, “animism” is a generalized perspec-
tive rather than a belief system proper only to “primitive societies.”
And he further cautions against taking the list as rigid.
Yet in a subtler vein, Cherry does seem to align “adult” taxono-
mies (in contrast with underdeveloped “child” taxonomies, which are
considered rife with errors, full of anthropomorphizing slippages be-
tween animal, inanimate matter, and human) with more hierarchal-
ized relations between elements, in the form of popular biological
understandings that encode more expected horizontal and vertical
relations among humans, nonhuman animals, and plants. Taking ani-
macy variabilities seriously, and not just as a matter of child develop-
ment, has consequences for possible resistance to what Cherry calls
“adult” taxonomies. It further demonstrates the likelihood that lan-
guage users will draw differing lines between what is “socially con-
structed” and what is “biological.” The cross-­linguistic consistencies
among the data do not vitiate this possibility of variation, even if they
might press us to contend with the notion that something widespread

27
 Chapter One

(even universal, that is to say, prevalent as a norm) about preferred

manners of distinguishing things just might be going on. Why, after
all, are person distinctions so common?
Studies of linguistic animacy tend to culminate in the idea that for
all of animacy’s many component features, their significance is collec-
tive: it is their derivation, or the contextual importance of some fac-
tors over others, that results in the most likely effector of the possible
action denoted by the verb. Comrie tentatively wrote, “A high degree
of animacy is necessary for a noun phrase to be interpreted as having
a high degree of control or as an experiencer, but is not a sufficient
condition.”13
Yamamoto, the author of the most recent comprehensive study of
linguistic animacy, has been even more salubriously tentative, writ-
ing that “in addition to the life concept itself, concepts related to the
life concept—such as locomotion, sentiency, etc.—can also be incor-
porated into the cognitive domain of ‘animacy.’”14 That is, lifeliness
in itself does not exhaust animacy. Even though animacy seems to
be generally scalar, it is not monolithic, since it is sensitive to fur-
ther distinctions; locomotion might trump sentience in one instance,
whereas the relation is reversed in another instance. More impor-
tantly, animacy is realized in sometimes radically different ways both
within and across languages. Yamamoto shows how many instances
controvert what the generalized animacy hierarchy predicts, even
when biological theories that contradict this hierarchy stand beside
such “knowledge,” whether because of early language conflations,
fanciful imagination, or a remarkable cosmology. (She shows this even
though she offers as examples the rather innocent ones of child lan-
guage, profound companion animal horizontality, fictional conceit,
and language representing decisions made by corporations.)15 That ab-
stractions tend to be placed at the bottom of animacy hierarchies be-
lies the fact that they are easily gendered or personified; consider the
conventionalized gendering in the United States of weather forces
such as hurricanes.
Furthermore, animacy variations may be within languages or across
them. For instance, within English, some language users may not make
any distinctions in animacy with their dogs, while others do; whereas
in Manam, an indigenous language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the
dual and paucal grammatical forms are used only for humans and a
select group of “domesticated dogs, birds (including fowls), and now

28
 Language and Mattering Humans

domesticated goats, horses and other larger animals introduced quite

recently into New Guinea,” though not necessarily used for the same
animals when they are wild.16
Given animacy’s insistent presence, as well as its variation, it is com-
pelling to consider where and how such hierarchies might be gen-
erated. For Cherry, animacy (which he calls animism) is a phenome-
nologically derived intuitive recognition of like kind on the basis of
one’s own embodiment, purposiveness, and activity, which is installed
early in development: “We are necessarily oriented to other enti-
ties in the very terms implicit in our orientation to our own selves.
Phenomenologically, the first figure against the background of the
world is always oneself.”17 This “like kind” recognition is similar to
what Ronald Langacker calls an empathy hierarchy.18 Yamamoto also at-
tributes animacy’s very hierarchical nature to anthropocentric human
cognition, but pointedly asks, “why [are] Homo sapiens supposed to be
much more ‘animate’ than, say, amoebae?”19 Further, she points out
that linguists themselves, beholden to human supremacy, have often
unthinkingly made the error of substituting “human/nonhuman” dis-
tinctions for “animate/inanimate.” The degree of anthropocentricity
most certainly varies, is arguably more cultural than universal, and
helps us to see how certain animate hierarchies or animate variants
become privileged in one group or another.
If animacy not only works in different ways for different cultures
but indicates different hierarchalizations of matter, then it is critical
to distinguish between relatively dominant formulations of animacy
hierarchies and relatively subordinated ones, a project that seems all
too vital for studies that reify the place in “nature” of non-­Western or
subordinated cosmologies.20 (If we were to assume that nonhuman
animals themselves had animacy hierarchies as part of their ontology,
then we could count nonhuman animacy hierarchies as also subor-
dinated.) There is thus good cause for either serious consideration
of subordinated animacy realizations or—as is my project here—­
mapping the coercivities and leakages of the dominant ones.
The rest of this book focuses on this conceptual hierarchy in the
context of the recent United States, while retaining a grasp on the ren-
derings of it presented here. While I consider the animacy hierarchy
as linguists do, as a prevalent conceptual structure and ordering that
might possibly come out of understandings of lifeliness, sentience,
agency, ability, and mobility in a richly textured world, I actively con-

29
 Chapter One

textualize this hierarchy as a politically dominant one, one potentially

affected and shaped by the spread of Christian cosmologies, capital-
ism, and the colonial orders of things. In this way, I depart from Yama-
moto, Cherry, and Comrie, since my understanding of grammar ex-
pands beyond linguistic coercion to broader strokes of biopolitical
governance.
That is to say, I read this hierarchy, treated by linguists as an avow-
edly conceptual organization of worldly and abstract things with
grammatical consequence, as naturally also an ontology of affect: for
animacy hierarchies are precisely about which things can or cannot af-
fect—or be affected by—which other things within a specific scheme
of possible action (with the added delimitation within linguistics that
the hierarchy is, with reference to a culturally shared order of things,
a field of reference whose shared usage facilitates communicating).
Finally, I take a rather uncommon linguistic approach of studying
not this dominant animacy hierarchy’s norms, but its failings—as I
call them, its leakages, its “ambivalent grammaticalities”—to map the
ways in which such a conceptual hierarchy cannot but fail, the ways in
which it must continually interanimate in spite of its apparent fixed-
ness. Above all, I claim that animacy is political, shaped by what or
who counts as human, and what or who does not.

Making Macaca
Animacy underlies language and serves in specific ways to inform
words and their affective potency. Utilizing linguistic theory and cog-
nitive linguistics to both follow and imagine language—at the same time
paying attention to the fault lines of these fields and their workings—
I am interested in tracing how animacy is defined, tested, and con-
figured via its ostensible opposite: the inanimate, deadness, lowness,
nonhuman animals (rendered as insensate), the abject, the object. In
what follows, I examine how the semantics and pragmatics of objec-
tification and dehumanization work through and within systems of
race, animality, and sexuality. Insults, shaming language, slurs, and in-
jurious speech can be thought of as tools of objectification, but these
also, in crucial ways, paradoxically rely on animacy as they objectify,
thereby providing possibilities for reanimation.21
Both objectification and dehumanization are central notions within
critical theory; in my view, these terms cannot operate without close

30
 Language and Mattering Humans

1. Senator George Allen pointing to S. R. Sidarth,

“this fellow here . . . macaca.” Still from YouTube
video, uploaded August 14, 2006.

attention to animacy. I begin with two recent examples of insulting

language to consider how de-­animation functions, in particular how
insults utilize complex social and political devices that hinge on ani-
macy. I then turn to summarize how both dehumanization and ob-
jectification have historically been theorized, considering a range of
thinkers, including Karl Marx and Frantz Fanon, to investigate how
these terms have been deployed.
On August 11, 2006, U.S. Senator George Allen, a Republican from
Virginia, at a rally related to his candidacy for reelection to the Sen-
ate, was being videorecorded by a Virginian of South Asian heritage,
Shekar Ramanuja (S. R.) Sidarth, who was a volunteer for the op-
posing Democratic campaign of James Webb. Sidarth was the only
nonwhite person present. Allen pointed to Sidarth (figure 1), saying:
“This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or what-
ever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around
everywhere. And it’s just great. . . . Let’s give a welcome to macaca,
here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.”22 Allen’s
gesture of pointing straight at Sidarth’s camera lens also had the effect
of pointing directly at the viewers of the video, viewers who thereby
potentially became implicated (or even hailed) in this exchange.

31
 Chapter One

Whether Allen was attempting to neutralize the felt threat of an

opponent’s videotaping of the event, or capitalizing on what he read as
an opportunity to emphasize the demographic and ideological differ-
ences between him and Webb, the means he chose to do so were un-
mistakably vicious (and apparently fatal, in the case of his candidacy).
This condensed utterance, when unpacked, suggests at the very least a
tacky commingling of racialized signifiers and negative insinuations:
“yellowness” as a signifier of Asianness; the lack of a proper (Ameri-
canized) name; being unworthy of a title (Allen was a Californian im-
port to Virginia and may have missed that eliding the honorific “Mr.”
is generally unacceptable in Southern politeness norms); the double
social meanings of “following” (suggesting a dependent child); the
exogeneity to the United States implied by “Welcome to America”
and a peripheral relationship to the authenticity and authority of Vir-
ginia as a state and as a place; and the presence of apparent Tunisian
slang for “monkey” or “macaque,” often used in racist ways to refer to
darker-­skinned Tunisians, some of whom are referred to in Tunisia
as “blacks.” If objectification works by a concert of language, ad-
dress, and gesture, are these some of the linguistic conditions of de-
humanization? Does dehumanization benefit—or is its process made
baldly transparent—by the explicitness of an animal direct compara-
tor against which the human is measured (such as a macaca)?
Within hours, Sidarth had reported the event to his supervisors.
The video of the event was eventually made public, timed carefully
by Webb’s campaign. While Allen initially denied that he had any-
thing to apologize for, the video’s presence ballooned on the Internet.
Its viewing in all parts of the United States effectively forced Allen to
eventually make an official apology. The incident was ultimately cred-
ited with Allen’s downfall; he lost his election bid to Webb. Though
Allen’s words functioned as “hate speech,” the responses to his out-
burst did not exactly follow the expected juridical or litigious routes,
for Sidarth did not sue or bring charges (as Wendy Brown has argued,
efforts to regulate such “injurious” language end up further legiti-
mizing the State).23 Instead, an inchoate collective public shaming
was aimed back at Allen. Mari Matsuda in 1989 wrote of the juridical
treatments of hate speech, “The choice of public sanction, enforced
by the state, is a significant one. The kinds of injuries and harms his-
torically left to private individuals to absorb and resist through pri-
vate means is no accident.”24 In this case, the viral potency of the video

32
 Language and Mattering Humans

demonstrated the publicity of the uptake of Allen’s act—particularly

as politicians are considered “public figures” rather than private citi-
zens—and worked outside the strict auspices of the State.
Animacy figures in this event in several senses, from the animality
implied by the insult itself, to the “viral” nature of the incident’s clip
on the Internet, which took on (as is said about such widely dispersed
videos) a life of its own. The Allen campaign’s first explanation was
that the word “sounded like” mohawk, in recognition of Sidarth’s hair-
style, a curious deflection toward another racialized figure (the Native
American). Sidarth said, however, that though the sides of his head
were shaved, he was sporting more of a “mullet,” yet another racial-
ized (white) and markedly classed hairstyle. Having long seemed to
minimize or conceal his heritage, Allen had reason not to acknowl-
edge the possible provenance of such a racial insult in the Tunisian
French of his own immigrant mother; when this fact was revealed,
Allen accused the questioning reporter of making “slights” against
him and his mother. A pointing gesture, for its part, can index pheno-
typic components of the structure of race and the scopic aspect of
show, example, and display. Allen’s accusatory pointing finger recalls
Frantz Fanon’s discussion of the utterance “Look, a black man!” while
“macaca” recalls Fanon’s uncertain equivocation between whether he
had been hailed as a “black man” or, in fact, an “animal.”25 In Fanon’s
oft-­discussed scene, the narrator is surrounded by whites at an Alge-
rian train station and is pointed to by a frightened child:
“Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me
as I passed by. I made a tight smile. “Look, a Negro!” It was true. It
amused me. “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter.
I made no secret of my amusement. “Mama, see the Negro! I’m
frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to
be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but
laughter had become impossible. . . . My body was given back to me
sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white
winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad.26
Fanon notes that that racist spectacle, in which the pointing is both
verbal and gestural, not only directs attention to a shared focus, but
it renders the (black) body into an object of consciousness; in its sub-
jectivity, it nevertheless becomes an object and is forced to cultivate a
“third-­person consciousness,” to be an objectified subject, one that in

33
 Chapter One

its objectivity becomes interchangeable with an animal. (I return to

Fanon later in this chapter.)
Media coverage of Allen’s “macaca” slur was comprehensive. In the
New York Times, Frank Rich wrote, “His defense in the macaca inci-
dent was that he had no idea that the word, the term for a genus of
monkey, had any racial connotation. But even if he were telling the
truth—even if Mr. Allen were not a racist—his non-­macaca words
were just as damning.”27 In Salon, Michael Scherer retold the story:
“Over the next week, people consult dictionaries in several languages.
They find that the word ‘macaca’ is a term for monkey, used in some
places around the world as a racial epithet.”28 Finally, in its “Person of
the Year: You” issue (subtitled “Yes, you. You control the Information
Age. Welcome to your world,” echoing Allen’s welcome to Sidarth),
Time profiled several individuals representing the new “digital democ-
racy,” among them Sidarth, in an implicit reference to the democrati-
cally styled viral video “activism” he initiated. In the profile’s only
reference to race, Sidarth says, “He’d never addressed me before, and
then to do so in this context, it was humiliating. That it was in a racial
context made it worse.”29
For all its facets, this very brief interchange precisely hinged on the
racial politics of animality, yet the complex historicity of racialized ani-
mality was quickly glanced over by the major news media covering
the event. All of these accounts referred to the use of “macaca” as
a racial epithet without elaboration, perhaps, in the elision, demon-
strating that the notion that calling someone a monkey is racist should
be self-­evident. Frank Rich’s writing asserted the common assump-
tion that one either is or is not a racist, rather than that one is woven
into and situated within specific discourses of racism. He did cor-
rectly identify the “damning” racializing of immigration in Allen’s
other utterances: it was while looking at Sidarth and indexing his physi-
cal and social position for others that Allen could utter “welcome to
the real America.”
There is no need to credit Allen with the inheritance of an exoge-
nous form of racism to explain its racial content (as Scherer did: “used
in some places around the world”). Allen only needed to have a refer-
ence to contemporary American architectures of racism; for instance,
a simian imputation for a human being readily invokes theories of
evolution that place monkeys and apes at earlier, “primitive” stages of
evolution or development than the “higher” humans being compared

34
 Language and Mattering Humans

to them. Many nuances of racism, while in some ways articulated

around “race,” are themselves built upon many complex animacy hier-
archies (animality being one), each of which can potentially impli-
cate directly the charge of racial abjection without reference to race
itself. Though Allen did not provide the equation between “race” and
“simian” as Fanon did, his surrounding speech and gesture, enabled by
an animacy hierarchy, made that equation evident.
For his part, Sidarth summed up the dense interchange with Allen
by addressing the salience of the nonhuman animal at its center: he
submitted a three-­word “essay” to a selective seminar at the University
of Virginia: “I am macaca.” (He did not write “I am Macaca,” which
would have the effect of individuating the type into a proper name.)
This declarative statement, referring to a positive identification with a
previous nomination that became a public event, an identification that
confronts its racist deployment while being categorically false, gets
simultaneously at the dizzying is-­and-­is-­not politics of the reclaiming
of insults, as well as at the shared taxonomic heritage of humans and
macaques. It also invites us to reconsider the structures that make that
simple equation either work or falter.

Turtle’s Eggs and Other Nonhumans

I turn now to another example to further illustrate how dehumaniz-
ing insults hinge on the salient invocation of the nonhuman animal.
In 1994, Jimmy Lai, the founder of the major Asian clothing brand
Giordano, who as a child had emigrated out of China to Hong Kong,
launched an in-­print diatribe against Chinese state repression which
culminated in a highly personal insult against then Chinese Premier
Li Peng. This railing was the latest of a series of outspoken criticisms
by Lai of Chinese nondemocratic policy: Lai had long been promoting
the importance of democratic principles such as free speech and free-
dom of the press within China. In an editorial in his Hong Kong news
magazine Next Weekly, he referred to Li Peng, the official who had
given final orders for the murderous response to the Tiananmen stu-
dent prodemocracy demonstrations in 1989, this way: “Not only are
you a wang bak dan [turtle’s egg], you are a wang bak dan with zero iq
Goodbye.”30
The “turtle’s egg” is an insult that implies a bastard provenance of a
human addressee. It was a patently absurd (hence, sacrilegious) repre-

35
 Chapter One

sentation; it yielded a reading of defiant insult; and it was taken very

seriously. Chinese authorities shut down Giordano stores and facto-
ries in China and Lai was forced to sell his interest in Giordano, re-
linquishing control of the company by 1996. The event’s transnational
character had many faces. At the time of Lai’s writing, Hong Kong
was in the midst of cultural identity politics in relation to China as it
ramped up for a handover to Chinese supervision planned for 1997. At
the time, Hong Kong remained a British colony with a degree of in-
dependence and a critical lens toward Chinese policy. The iq measure
is its own transnational phenomenon, originating out of the psycho-
metrics movements in Europe and the United States, which were in-
formed by eugenics.31 An attribution of “zero iq” is in a sense more
precise than “stupid”: focusing on intelligence measures, it signifies
a scientifically authorized diagnosis of severe cognitive disability, as
well as a dearth of a particular kind of intelligence or competence
that might be characterized as “Western.” At the zero iq limit, how-
ever, Lai might be suggesting something about human disability’s own
seeming limit: a radical lack of subjectivity, of capacity for judgment;
in American terms, a “vegetable.”
In the following diagram, I visually map Lai’s utterance (figure 2).
As with any diagram, some explanation of terms is in order. With the
exception of the turtle egg image, the orbs each represent “possible
worlds,” not in the philosophical sense (as a series of ontological con-
ditions related to the “real” world that could be true or false), but in a
cognitive sense, where everything is conceptualized (some of which
is in relation to one’s material setting, for instance) and “reality” is
only that which enjoys maximal epistemic value. Loosely based on
the schematics of Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s conceptual
integration theory, each orb is a field of meaning, including like or
experientially related elements, the characteristics of each element,
and the relationships between elements.32 Each element can itself be
a world, just as bodies themselves are arguably cohesive entities inter-
nally structured. Between the turtle egg and the son of a turtle egg is
a link, a kinship relation of filiality and biological reproduction.
In cognitive terms, each circle is a conceptual “space.” In this view
of language, as prompts are received as conceptual directives by way
of language’s precise grammatical forms, conceptualizers manipulate
spaces according to the conventions of those linguistic forms, add-
ing elements to them, forming connections, changing configurations

36
 Language and Mattering Humans

2. A cognitive linguistic mapping of Li Peng’s utterance. Diagram by the author.

of elements: in essence, animating them. This conceptual “mattering”

is ontologizing in the sense that it has a relation (which is however
sometimes nonidentical) to considered “reality” and is hence emi-
nently consequential. Note that while the diagram suggests an invita-
tion to imagine how things proceed, it is nothing like a representation of
language or of meaning; rather, according to Fauconnier and Turner,
it simply “corresponds” to interpretive possibilities of language pro-
cessing.33
In effectively being urged by Lai (or the citation of Lai) to consider
Li Peng the “son of a turtle egg with zero iq,” a conceptualizer (regard-
less of desire) is prompted to reconcile the two, that is, to form a cog-
nitive blend between “Li Peng” and the conceptualization prompted
by the noun phrase “son of a turtle egg with zero iq.” These are the
suturing and coercive functions of linguistic address and, more gen-
erally, of language used indexically; as Denise Riley writes, “if there is
linguistic love which is drawn outward to listen, there’s also linguistic
hatred, felt by its object as drawn inward. A kind of ‘extimacy’ pre-
vails in both cases.”34 While there are many interpretive possibilities
for the “son of a turtle egg” (is it a son of a “bastard,” a diminutive bas-
tard, a really tiny egg?), key to interpreting this event is its paradoxi-

37
 Chapter One

cal dehumanization: at once, Li Peng is reaffirmed as human, while

simultaneously, in some interpretations, made part turtle. The vio-
lence of the insult is located in the simultaneity of Li Peng’s human and
nonhuman animal conceptualization (again, is-­and-­is-­not), and in the
sexual politics by which “bastards” are stigmatized. Without assuming
any actual psychic injury to Li Peng himself, the insult revealed that
his administration perceived his political image as somewhat vulner-
able and therefore undertook recriminatory measures.

A Note on Diagrams
Within linguistics, diagrams are used as methods to spatialize or
render visual more abstract concepts. As Fauconnier and Turner write,
“While this static way of illustrating conceptual integration is conve-
nient for us, such a diagram is really just a snapshot of an imaginative
and complicated process that can involve deactivating previous con-
nections, reframing previous spaces, and other actions.”35 Here I take a
brief detour, or explanatory digression, to think through my own use
of the diagram—a very particular kind of image—within this book.
Viewed as suspect in its association with positivist science, or at best
eccentric, and understood as comparatively coercive, final in intent,
and static in meaning, the diagram occupies a peculiar place (or a no-­
place) in contemporary written discourses of philosophy and critical
theory (much more fraught than the photograph or illustration); as a
two-­dimensional medium, it seems to stand for complete certainty,
or a lack of interpretive flexibility. Once an occasional-­to-­frequent
accompanist to textual argumentation (for instance, the illustrations
of gendered signage accompanying Lacan’s famous discussion of “uri-
nary segregation”),36 it is now to be almost superstitiously avoided, if
conversations with my colleagues in the humanities over the years are
any indication.
When the diagram does inch into the genres of science studies,
it does so with a telling ambivalence. Donna Haraway, for instance,
offers an “apologetics of the table.” When announcing a ten-­page table
on biological kinship in the twentieth century, she writes, “Claiming
to be troubled by clear and distinct categories, I will nonetheless ner-
vously work with a wordy chart, a crude taxonomic device to keep
my columns neatly divided and my rows suggestively linked.”37 Rec-
ognizing that the appearance of diagrams in this kind of text is “ner-

38
 Language and Mattering Humans

vous,” or at the very least somewhat unusual, it is my hope that they

are viewed as an invitation to play, to take up alternative means of ap-
prehending the offerings of a text.
Far from being positivist accounts of the workings of a mind (and
no self-­respecting scientist would believe in a diagram’s ontological
veridicality), the diagrams are meant to be taken as further mediators
of knowledge production. Without bowing to the final superiority of
either word or image, a diagram thus grants the polyvocalities that
texts offer. But as any art historian can also tell us, an image, whether an
elaborated photograph or a denuded line drawing, need (should) not
be taken at face value. For instance, though Deleuze and Guattari write
in A Thousand Plateaus that “a diagram has neither substance nor form,
neither content nor expression,” they include several line drawings (in-
cluding one that charts “the center of the signifier”) that could be cate-
gorized as diagrams.38 They attempt to debunk the diagram’s unde-
served attribution of perfectionism and its apparent aspiration to truth
status. Following Deleuze and Guattari, for me diagrams function to
animate thinking, and to prompt new configurations of a­ nalysis.
The diagram mentioned earlier is no exception to my invitation
to play, the immediate evidence being the random placement of the
turtle. Anna Tsing uses both a diagram and an image representation
of an acronym and meditates on the meaning of “play” in reference to
the “oversimplified” diagram she uses: “I name each of the three scale-­
making projects I discuss in a self-­consciously joking manner. Yet the
playfulness is also a serious attempt to focus attention on the specificity
and process of articulation.”39 That is, diagrams focus attention, as do
texts; they simultaneously perform and suggest apparent condensa-
tions and connectivities of knowledge structures. Furthermore, and
I know I generalize here, the resolute alignments against diagrams
(within the humanities) and for them (within the social sciences) fur-
ther displace these respective sectors toward or away from certain
thinking types, or cognitive styles. Importantly, these are styles that
can be understood as gendered and ableized.

Being Vegetable: Animate Subjects and Abject Objects

There are very basic questions about animality, objectification, and
humanity embedded within the examples of George Allen and Jimmy
Lai. What is “macaca”? What is “I”? What, finally, is it to be “human”?

39
 Chapter One

How do these categorizations, and the elisions as well as the segre-

gations between them, work? On what principles of division and
identity are they coded? And how do codes shift for different bodies?
These questions begin to get at the complexities of many structures
of inequality, not least sexism, homophobia, and ableism. Further, if
racism is the hierarchalization of power and privilege across lines of
race, then its reliance on the construction of a fragile humanity is one
of its most profound dependencies.
We have seen two examples of dehumanization by way of juxta-
position and blending with relatively animate and (arguably) inani-
mate substances, a macaca and a turtle’s egg (which contains within
it only the future potential of lifeliness). While each of these close
readings may make local sense, a question remains: what background
assumptions or structures must be present, or serve as support, for
these dehumanizations to do their imaginative work? At the least,
what seems almost certainly operative in both these cases is a refer-
ence cline (a graded linear scale) resembling a “great chain of being,”
an ordered hierarchy from inanimate object to plant to nonhuman
animal to human, by which subject properties are differentially dis-
tributed (with humans possessing maximal and optimal subjectivity at
the top). When humans are blended with objects along this cline, they
are effectively “dehumanized,” and simultaneously de-­subjectified and
objectified.
The insults macaca and turtle’s egg with zero iq may well be examples
of “abject subjects”: a subject aware of its abjection; a clashing embodi-
ment of dignity as well as of shame. This paradox of the simultaneity of
abjection and subjectivity is particularly emphasized in Julia Kristeva’s
articulation of the abjection of self: “If it be true that the abject simul-
taneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand
that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject,
weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside,
finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible consti-
tutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.”40 The examples
are, far from merely propositional, deeply imbued with affect: in the
coincidence of high stature and base animality, the blendings embody
an intensity, a fraught collision between humanity and “­zeroness.”
What does it mean to exist at the level of the zero, moving away
from humanness down the animacy hierarchy? Take the phrase “I just
don’t want to be a vegetable,” uttered by a person who fears a loss of

40
 Language and Mattering Humans

mental capacities. This sentence simply does not make sense unless it
is understood as a disavowal of the next relevant position on a cline,
a position to which one could slide if deprived of certain subjective
properties. Between vegetable and animal lies a notable conventional
difference in mentality, if we can call it that: the presence of an entity
called the brain, which is commonly afforded the locus of thought.
*“I just don’t want to be a stone” (recalling Aristotle’s soul-­less body),
however, seems to go too far within this dominant hierarchy (and thus
receives a linguist’s mark for ungrammaticality or unacceptability, the
asterisk); some kind of animacy, some kind of thriving and sensitivity,
must be preserved for the person’s denial to highlight the major locus
of difference between what is desired and what is undesired. The vary-
ing acceptability of these phrases reiterates that subjective properties
are assigned to various stations on that cline, running from human, to
animal, to vegetable, to inanimate stone.
If we ask further what lies beyond the strict material positionality
of an object, what the object may have been affectively invested with—
in a sense, this is to acknowledge that vegetality may be defined as
more than simply not being able to think, but a failure of lifeliness,
of ability to act upon others—we find something like animacy. The
question then becomes: Who are the proper mediums of affect? Are
they humans? Humans and animals? Vegetables? Or inanimate enti-
ties, such as the incorporeal blend or a “dead” but warming and com-
forting piece of furniture?
“I just don’t want to be a vegetable,” while seemingly an imaginative
fancy, also informs, microcosmically and iteratively, of what proper
humanity resembles—nonvegetables—and, further, that humans
could in some way become vegetables. Further, it describes what dis-
credited human subjects are like: vegetables. Indeed, vegetables, be-
lieved to be living, are not at the bottom of the animacy hierarchy,
as stones seem to be; for instance, when humans and nonhuman ani-
mals eat them, they have specific effects and can be either nourish-
ing or toxic to bodily systems. As Jane Bennett cogently notes, food
itself is an “actant.”41 Using a term like persistent vegetative state poten-
tially, again microcosmically, informs us of how we should understand
vegetables themselves: vegetables cannot think; they are passive; they
merely survive; they are dependent, not freestanding plants, but par-
taking of plants’ nutrients. In this way, the “vegetality” (constructed
between the medicalized language of “persistent vegetative state” and

41
 Chapter One

the lay expression “she’s a vegetable”) of Terri Schiavo, whose non-

speaking body became the subject of contentious national, legal, and
interfamilial debate for seven years, culminating in the court-­ordered
removal of her feeding tube in 2005, became a politicized linguistic
event as well as a politicized discussion about life and death.42 Indeed,
Lennard Davis has pointed out that had Terri Schiavo been consid-
ered a “severely disabled woman” rather than a “vegetable,” different
politics—even different legal consequences—would have ensued.43
As many scholars and activists have made clear, disability politics is a
consistently unacknowledged and erased partner to right-­to-­die bio-
ethical considerations; everyone loses by not thinking deeply enough
about their underlying connections.
To the insistence of disability rights on the legitimacy of such lives
as Schiavo’s and the need for serious consideration of what is so dis-
missively dubbed vegetality, we might add an unlikely consider-
ation by N. Katherine Hayles, who takes seriously the lessons of in-
formation architectures that distribute subjectivities among bodies
and technologies, thereby threatening conventional definitions of
human consciousness: “Shift the seat of identity from brain to cell or
from neocortex to brainstem, and the nature of the subject radically
changes. . . . Conscious mind can be hijacked, cut off by mutinous
cells, absorbed into an artificial consciousness, or back-­propagated
through flawed memory. . . . Whether consciousness is seen as a pre-
cious evolutionary achievement that we should fight to preserve . . .
or as an isolation room whose limits we are ready to outgrow, we can
no longer simply assume that consciousness guarantees the existence
of the self. In this sense, the posthuman subject is also a postconscious
subject.”44 It is in such embroiled contexts that, given the conceptual
resources that are loosely called animacy structures, language users of
all kinds (including institutions and collectivities) not only contain
or break the proper domain of vegetables, be they vegetal or human.
Language users use animacy hierarchies to manipulate, affirm, and
shift the ontologies that matter the world.

Dehumanization and Objectification

How are objectification and dehumanization positioned in relation to
animacy? The two are not synonyms, but they do exist within over-
lapping spheres of meaning; and, I argue, they come to mean in a

42
 Language and Mattering Humans

similar way in the brutal hierarchies of sentience in which only some

privileged humans are granted the status of thinking subject. I exam-
ine both terms, sometimes unearthing quite specific meanings (Marx-
ian objectification, for instance, which bleeds into dehumanization),
but cognizant of the ways that the terms sometimes diverge; through-
out, I gloss them as responding to or logically relying upon underlying
animacy hierarchies.
What, after all, does it mean to dehumanize? In present times, cer-
tainly the animalizations and dehumanizations of suspected “terror-
ists”—discernible in extrajudicial complexes of cages and discourses
of “barbaric” practices and militarized hunts (for instance, the presi-
dential candidate John Kerry’s comment in a debate: “I will hunt them
down, and we’ll kill them”)—implicitly invoke economies within the
animacy hierarchy. If dehumanization often involves a positive (that
is, active) force, then what acts work to do so? One form of what is
understood as dehumanization involves the removal of qualities espe-
cially cherished as human; at other times, dehumanization involves
the more active making of an object.45
Indeed, perhaps the most unsparing dehumanization is an approxi-
mation toward death. Critical disability and feminist studies have
raised biopolitical questions about certain living states of being that
have been marked as equivalent to death: death was one of the many
“bleak” futures prescribed by strangers, doctors, and fellow patients
to the critical disability theorist Alison Kafer upon apprehending her
body.46 There are, too, conditions of illness so profoundly altering that
categories of life, death, object, and subject are powerfully rewritten.
Susan Schweik points to the ways in which disability has proven
to be a rubric by which people are dehumanized within regulating
regimes of public law in the United States in her book The Ugly Laws:
Disability in Public. She describes a Chicago city ordinance from 1881
which sought to “abolish all street obstructions,” written in language
that “makes it sound at first as if the ‘ugliness’ in question concerned
inanimate objects, such as ‘piles of bricks.’ But the street obstructions
turned out to be humans.”47 The coincident relation between legalis-
tic abstraction (obstruction), inanimacy (piles of bricks), and certain
humans (the targets of the ugly laws in this case) speaks of a stun-
ning (if quiet) suturing of animacy terrains to public sentiment, legal
bodies, and notions of propriety, a suturing to which people with
visible disabilities are regularly subjected.

43
 Chapter One

Consider another instance that involves the deathly recategoriza-

tion of otherwise “live” embryos. Charis Thompson writes of clinics
for assisted reproductive technology which develop two categories of
embryo, the “good” embryos and the “bad” embryos, whose defini-
tion may flex with the growing privatization of assisted reproductive
technology:
There are thus only certain conditional outcomes by which embryos
become waste, all of which involve conditions that cannot be known
about before they occur, even if it is necessary to plan for their pos-
sibility. These conditions include the undesired but almost entirely
uncontested “medical” reasons, where embryos die or a technician
judges them abnormal after fertilization, division, or thawing. This
category may grow, granting waste immunity to a wider range of
embryos, as preimplantation genetic diagnosis becomes more wide-
spread and reveals more abnormalities in apparently normal em-
bryos. . . . The largely private questions on the status of embryos in
the clinic may well not be containable if stem-­cell and other bio-
medical technologies break the tight fit that I described as a mo-
nopoly of desperation where physicians, patients, activists, and drug
companies have managed to forge collective interests through inter-
acting spheres of privacy.48
Thompson points to the contingency of the life and death of em-
bryos in the biopolitical futures of assisted reproductive clinics, where
a more sensitized mapping of “abnormalities” (read as, for instance,
disabilities or undesired conditions) broadens zones of terminability.
Her savvy term waste immunity points to the resilient untouchability of
a thing that has been declared as waste and its deployment by rapidly
privatizing interests.
A second form of dehumanization is transformation (or, indeed,
imaginative transmogrification: the transformation into a grotesque
or fantastic appearance, which I consider in the “Animals” part of this
book), though each form (removal of qualities and active transforma-
tion) readily imputes the other in the extended analysis. The figura-
tive substitution of a human with an animal figure often accomplishes
both of these things and constitutes a displacement to lower levels of
the animacy hierarchy. The two types, indeed, have been equated by
various feminisms, studies of colonialism, and Marxist approaches. A
brief overview of the historical claims of these discourses, which con-
tinue to inform contemporary theory, can demonstrate how animacy

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 Language and Mattering Humans

hierarchies have been long used to reason. Generally, discussions of

dehumanization and objectification depict persons actively subordi-
nated to structures of authority: in the criticism, these may include
laborers in a capitalist economy, women within patriarchal structures,
medicalized and de-­subjectified disabled persons, persons of color
subjected to racist psychologies, and persons exposed to the effects, or
aftereffects, of economies put into effect during colonization. Above
and beyond the possibility of dehumanization, objectification is often
also understood to deprive people of their proper humanist freedoms
and rights.
In Marxist discourse, two objectifications are of note. With indus-
trialization’s introduction of capital, private property, and the eco-
nomic and social relations that result, there emerges an investment
of value in the objects produced by labor (the reification of the com-
modity object as a fetish) and concomitantly an estrangement of the
workers who perform that labor (hence, their commodification). Of
objectification, particularly the relations between the objectification
of labor, labor’s products, and the animality of laborers themselves,
Marx writes, in “The Estrangement of Labor”:
We shall begin from a present-­day economic fact. The worker be-
comes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production
increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper
commodity the more goods he produces. The devaluation of the
human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of
the world of things. Labour not only produces commodities; it also
produces itself and the workers as a commodity, and indeed in the
same proportion as it produces commodities in general. . . . Finally,
the external character of labour for the worker is demonstrated by
the fact that it belongs not to him but to another, and that in it he
belongs not to himself but to another. . . . The result is that man
(the worker) feels that he is acting freely only in his animal func-
tions—eating, drinking, and procreating, or at most in his dwelling
and adornment—while in his human functions, he is nothing more
than animal. It is true that eating, drinking, and procreating, etc.,
are also genuine human functions. However, when abstracted from
other aspects of human activity, and turned into final and exclusive
ends, they are animal.49
Marx reasons capitalism’s deprivations using notions of estrange-
ment, barbarity, animal life, possessibility, and control relationships.

45
 Chapter One

For Marx, the creation of an alienated laborer depends on a concerted

interplay of factors, including the unequal distribution of capital, the
enhanced nature of “things” as opposed to the “human world,” the
identification of a laborer with the labor it produces, and the depen-
dency of a laborer on that labor. One consequence of this transforma-
tion of social and economic relations is the loss of a laborer’s connec-
tion to its once-­elaborate human nature (presumably civilization and
the enjoyment of other “higher” forms of social relation), leaving it
in the world of the “animal functions.” Furthermore, self-­possession
is no longer the laborer’s right, since the laborer belongs to the labor
on which it depends for its livelihood. Commodification impels the
laborer away from what makes it distinctively human and toward the
circumscribed and limited lives of animals: “they are animal.”
I pause here to note that in such invocations not only is the ani-
mal caught on the wrong side of a species boundary, but theoriz-
ing has caught itself up in a contradiction of downward deferral that
cannot quite succeed. Hence, perhaps the most significant, and most
commented-­upon, “leak” within animacy hierarchies: Human self-­
representation’s original “error,” if such a determination could be ven-
tured, was in attempting to essentially provoke an unhappy wresting
of animacy in order to apply it “above” the level of the animal itself
(a simple class to which humans certainly belong), to the realm of the
(rationalized) subject. In domains of taxonomic dependence, the is-­
and-­is-­not complex rises again here, affectively intense in its contra-
diction.
There are consequences for this precarious design, co-­conspiring as
it must with prelapsarian fantasies of mirthful animality, precivilized
and innocent. For the “human,” feeling must then be forever in battle
with rationality, and as humanity’s categorical guarantor, rationality
had every time to win out as the exclusive and primary property of
humans. The responsibilities of feeling then fell to lower places on
the hierarchy—women, animals, racialized men, disabled people, and
incorporeals such as devils or demons. The theory of the subject thus
had consequences that had everything to do with animacy and mat-
tering, given the distribution of ontological castings down along the
hierarchy. Marx hinges the human struggle with alienation precisely
against “the animal,” almost backhandedly leaving an illusory vitality
to the animal itself (since otherwise it would just be a commodity).
Marx’s theorizations of objectification raise questions retrospec-

46
 Language and Mattering Humans

tively: how did such qualities become collectively available to him in

the context and era in which he did his work? More precisely, what
informed Marx’s vision of the process which objectifies and alienates
the worker? And further, what led him to populate this vision with
the elements that form the consequential relationships? What is the
nature of the substance that is lost in the process he describes? Marx
partook of a long philosophical tradition harking back at least to Aris-
totle, one which carefully segregated humans from, and reasoning via,
nonhuman animals (thus defined as simply “animals”), in which a con-
dition of human animality (or barbarity) represents the simultaneous
legitimation of enslavement, a relative lack of philosophical awareness
other than recognition of one’s need to be ruled, and a dispossession
of right to self-­determination (hence, justified enslavement).
Marx also emphasizes objectification as the insidious concealment
of labor in the creation of products, products which carry with them
or are animated by another displaced form of value, in the form of
commodity fetishism. In Marx, we already begin to see the associa-
tive indictments that might befall a victim of perhaps other kinds of
objectification, animalization, or dispossession. What gave Marx ac-
cess to these associations was, of course, in some part his innovation;
but we might further imagine that he was also relying on an animacy-­
inflected economy of humans, animals, and objects as his own refer-
ential field.
In the past few decades, feminist theory has also detailed ways in
which women can be or have been objectified by representational
practices. Laura Mulvey’s classic text from 1975, “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” examined psychoanalytic aspects of the con-
temporary cinematic conventions of Hollywood, particularly male
heterosexual pleasure and fetishistic desire.50 In such a view, women
are thus posed as visual object, staged against a socially cultivated
union between the perceiving and acting male subject, a kind of con-
densed object-­making which has borne significant discussion not only
in feminist film theory and feminist theories of race and transnational-
ity (for instance, Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s indictment of Western anthropo-
logical discourses’ selectively voyeuristic gaze),51 but also in relation
to pornography, which is a particularly polarizing topic for feminist
debate.52
Some feminists believe that pornography unambiguously denigrates
women, as its images treat women as immovable or inanimate prop-

47
 Chapter One

erty, “like chattel.” The title of Andrea Dworkin’s antiporn study writ-
ten in 1981 summarizes this view: Pornography: Men Possessing Women.53
What is more, Dworkin occasionally turns to animals as metaphors
for objectification, for instance, writing about the derogatory use of
the term beaver to describe both a woman and her genitals. (Indeed,
nonhuman animals figure prominently in arguments about female ob-
jectification.54 Carol J. Adams, in her book The Sexual Politics of Meat,
polemically argues that the treatment of women is much like the
treatment of meat for human consumption.55) Catharine MacKinnon
defines pornography as “graphic sexually explicit materials that subor-
dinate women through pictures or words,”56 though this understand-
ing does not allow for a great range of positionalities (with regard to
sexuality, gender, and race) of readers of the images that might impact
how they are situated within these discourses. Radical queer thinkers
such as Gayle Rubin, writing against Dworkin and MacKinnon, em-
phasize that objectification should not be monolithically condemned
and point to the many shades of desirable objectification in sexual
erotics both explicit and subterranean.57 Mulvey’s work, too, has been
taken to task by black feminists like bell hooks for its inattention to
resistant gazes and nondominant subjects of looking.58
Disability theory forthrightly confronts the complexities of the ob-
jectifications inherent in staring.59 It has also offered some provocative
and important responses to mainstream feminist denouncements of
(women’s) human objectification. For these denouncements of ob-
jectification can easily come attached to a logic in which objectifica-
tion is disability and, as a disability, must be overcome. Susan Wen-
dell, responding to the implicit ableism of feminisms (for instance,
Iris Marion Young’s definition of women under patriarchy as physi-
cally handicapped), suggests, “Until feminists criticize our own body
ideals and confront the weak, suffering, and uncontrollable body in
our theorizing and practice, women with disabilities and illnesses are
likely to feel that we are embarrassments to feminism.”60
In Alison Kafer’s “Compulsory Bodies: Reflections on Heterosexu-
ality and Able-Bodiedness,” which studies Adrienne Rich’s signal essay
for feminism and queer theory, she traces the linking of Rich’s les-
bian subject to an elaborated position of implicit able-­bodiedness
and discusses Rich’s single invocation of the word disabling, which is
used metaphorically to signal a state that should not be tolerated for
women: “Disability only appears as the negative other.”61 Furthermore,

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 Language and Mattering Humans

disability theorists suggest that there are alternatives to the othering

closure of the spectacle: as Sarah Chinn shows us, it is within a multi-
sensory economy and a disability framework that Audre Lorde, in her
biomythography Zami, “replaces struggles over ‘objectification’ and
‘sexual freedom’ with a sexual language that represents lesbian bodies
as sacred, communicative, instrumental, textured, difficult.”62
Hoping to add more philosophical nuance to feminist debates about
objectification, Martha Nussbaum, in her essay “Objectification,” iden-
tifies seven ways of “seeing and/or treating of someone as an object,”
including instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, vio-
lability/breakability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity.63 Through her
analyses of a few classic literary texts of sexual objectification that
she takes as “morally assessable,” she attempts to rescue the previously
totalizing readings of sexual objectification from the likes of Mac-
Kinnon, suggesting that “some features of objectification . . . may be
either necessary or wonderful features of sexual life.”64 Linguistic ob-
jectification can indeed bring pleasures, sexual or otherwise: evidence
the use of terms of endearment such as my little pumpkin, my dear heart,
even honey. Between these extremes, of course, is the cognitive pro-
cess of mundane object-­rendering as the result of everyday cognizing
and discourse: the very act of naming, pointing, indicating, discussing
other people, beings, and objects. Yet it is important to recognize that
linguistic objectification is framed by historical, national, and social
configurations of power, and is not always able to be recuperated into
realms of pleasure.
Theorists of colonialism have examined the ways that colonization
affects the self-­determination of a subordinated people, particularly
the ways in which colonization presses both “colonizer” and “colo-
nized” into mutual psychological entanglement, compromising any
renewal or nascency of national identity and leaving effects long after
any formal establishment of independence. Given that colonial ex-
pansion in Western Europe was driven in part by an abiding scientific
racism that drew on the framings of Enlightenment thought, subjects
of the colonies posed an apt exercise for the emphatic reiteration of
the relative humanity of European colonizers as compared to the ani-
mality or “objectness” of the colonized.65 The process of colonization
has in fact been referred to by Aimé Césaire as thingification.66
Emphasizing the anxious psychology of the colonial interaction,
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, writes, “When we consider

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 Chapter One

the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so character-

istic of the colonial epoch, we realize that nothing has been left to
chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was
indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their
darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive
into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they
would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality.”67
Because a process of economic and territorial domination in the his-
tory of European colonialism has inevitably summoned forms of
psychological support in one domain or another, colonial subjects are
often understood to be represented and treated as in some way “less”
than fully human subjects, less than fully self-­possessed, readily “sub-
ject to subjugation,” and further, potentially pressed to see themselves
in such terms. Fanon points to, on the part of colonized subjects, the
approximation of “barbarism, degradation and bestiality” (that is, a
felt closeness and a recent occupation) made evident in the fear of
return. Here is a further kind of objectification: a dispossession of
humanist self-­determination, self-­definition, and agency. Colonialism
was, and continues to be, driven by capitalism and hence invested in
the management of domains of private ownership. In the context of
an analysis of the cultural logic of capitalism, critical race theory has
examined the durative rendering of slaves in the United States as legal
property rather than citizen-­subjects proper, particularly the histori-
cal weaving of enslaved African and Caribbean bodies into U.S. prop-
erty law. This important work not only examines the contemporary
legal ramifications of an early rendering of slaves as property but fur-
ther examines the legacy of such a bifurcation of citizen-­subjectivity
and objects of property.68
As this excursus details, many of the theoretical discussions about
objectification invoke inanimate or less-­animate matter as well as ani-
mals as generalized standards of comparison, often rendering the dis-
tinctions between these categories as simplified and even templatic.
In fact, many contemporary discourses continue to disavow, if not
simply ignore, the possibility of significant horizontal relations be-
tween humans, other animals, and other objects. Within such dis-
courses, the category “animal” often comes with a segregating frame
that categorically opposes “human” to “animal”; any symmetries be-
tween humans and other animals tend to emerge as marked, as in the
phrase the human animal.

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 Language and Mattering Humans

Thought and Cognition

One of the ironies made evident in Sidarth’s essay-­statement “I am
macaca” is that at the same moment that it claims a macaca identity,
it simultaneously must preserve the speaker’s human capacity for lan-
guage, for articulation. That is, a macaque is simply unlikely to speak
those words (at least, let us say, these exact words), for we would ask a
language of it that is apparently not its own. This is indeed one of the
ironies of the general use of language to dehumanize: while (human)
language is being used to impute a nonhuman animality to a human,
it is also already viewed as a unique quality of humans.
To return to the linguistic mattering that opened this chapter, I re-
fute the recent moves to evacuate substance from language, for in-
stance, the notion that language is simply dematerialized; one of the
outcomes of this belief, it seems to me, is that language discussions
seem to disappear in the theorizing of new materialisms. The concern
about language’s absent materiality has in part to do with what are, in
my view, misconceptions regarding the role of thought and mentality
in general, which language is understood primarily to register. For all
the attention paid to nonverbal communication, it is true that much
scholarship about language renders it proximate to thought, which is
a dangerous territory for those attempting to move away from “the
subject” and its philosophical trappings.69 For some theorists, language
is dependent upon or issuing from thought and intentionality, so that
nonhuman animals which appear to use complex communication but
which do not exhibit complex cognition or do not clearly evidence
communicative intent are thereby discredited. Yet what is understood
as “thought” continues to expand in contemporary social sciences and
humanities, particularly among cognitive scientists and philosophers;
associated notions such as “judgment,” “decision,” and “comparison”
have gradually shed their humanist accoutrements and augmented,
for instance, their neurological and sensory correlates, opening to the
possibility of their capacity in other creatures than human.
The idea that language structure is intimately tied to thought struc-
ture—that is, linguistic relativity—reaches back to Benjamin Lee
Whorf ’s “strong” linguistic determinist theories concerning the rela-
tionships among language, thought, and culture; according to Whorf,
language structure has a determinative effect, a constraining effect, on
what could be habitually thought or imagined by its speakers.70 Later
theories of weak linguistic relativity, which were more widely taken

51
 Chapter One

up by linguists, discuss a less rigid version of determinism, allowing

for a nonabsolute relationship between language and thought, that is,
language did not necessarily have a say on what would be conceptual-
izable for its speakers.
The cognitive linguist Dan Slobin, suggesting “thinking for speak-
ing” as an activity-­specific corrective to the vagaries of linguistic
relativity (such as about what exactly constitutes “thought,” or even
“habitual thought”), describes the ways that linguistic and cognitive
structures must be engaged for speaking to happen: “there is a special
kind of thinking that is intimately tied to language—namely, think-
ing that is carried out, on-­line, in the process of speaking.”71 Here I
must make a special note of sign language, for which the grammatical
complexity and level of sophistication of gesture takes center stage
(whereas it is deemphasized for many spoken language users, espe-
cially those for whom gesture is less necessary for communication to
be satisfying). It is in signing that language’s materiality becomes par-
ticularly apparent, though the spatial iconicity of asl (to take one sign
language) is by no means a simplistic mapping, and it indeed seems to
be mediated by certain cognitive preferences among signers.72
Two cognitive linguists, Ronald Langacker and Gilles Fauconnier,
developed theories (Cognitive Grammar and Mental Space Theory,
respectively) in which language—that is, spoken, written, gestural
language—is a multimodal series of conceptual directives, meant to
alert and enliven the conceptual imaginary in order to build, elabo-
rate, and indeed animate cognitive entities (and such conceptualization
is presumably not unique to human language users).73 Thus, rather
than juxtapose or oppose thought and language, cognitive linguists
and cognitive anthropologists imagine an ontological confluence be-
tween them. Under this view, conventions of “semantics” provide for
the templatic readiness of conceptual elements, while conventions
of “grammar” provide for the templatic conceptual manipulation of
those elements.
Thus, in a cognitive rendering of listening between speakers or see-
ing between signers, the “processing” of language—for all the formal-
istic computation such a term as processing suggests—simply amounts
to bringing a listener’s unique conceptualization to bear, via “blend-
ing,” on structures or parts of structures alerted by specific linguistic
features such as gestural articulation or location (affecting the spatial
relationality of the indicated element to the rest of the structure being

52
 Language and Mattering Humans

constructed), paralinguistic features such as facial expression (add-

ing affectivity), or in the case of spoken grammar, locative prefixa-
tion (affecting the spatial relationality of an element to the rest of the
structure), nominalization (staticizing and substantivizing an other-
wise more dynamic element), adjectivization (modifying an existing
substantive element with properties), and adverbials (modifying and
shaping a dynamic event).
Thus, it is due to both semantics and grammar that a phrase such
as Allen’s “this fellow here . . . macaca” objectifies. Or, to take a dif-
ferent example, “those queers over there” could be said to quadruply
objectify a group of humans. This utterance (1) collectivizes a num-
ber of individuals as a group, which in linguistic terms constitutes a
shift down the animacy hierarchy, all else being equal (particularly for
contexts in which individualist social norms are maintained); (2) dis-
tantiates them by use of the distant demonstrative deictic “those”;
(3) marshals the distant locative deictic “there,” which prompts a con-
ceptualizer to render an element as distant rather than proximate from
the reference point of “here”; and (4) invokes the nominal (non-­)use of
queer, which, thanks at least in part to the nominalizing will of queer
identity politics, continues to do the iterative—even de-­animating—
work of substantivizing the still predominantly adjectival queer.
Language is as much alive as it is dead, and it is certainly material.
For humans and others, spoken and signed speech can involve the
tongue, vocal tract, breath, lips, hands, eyes, and shoulders. It is a cor-
poreal, sensual, embodied act. It is, by definition, animated. But in
spite of, or because of, the so-­called linguistic turn (which occurred
outside of the social-­science discipline of linguistics, largely in the
humanities) and the influence of poststructuralist thought, language
in theory has in many ways steadily become bleached of its quality
to be anything but referential, or structural, or performative. Some
attempts at theorizing language have been labeled shallow “linguis-
ticisms” that fail to recognize, or include, the vast materialities that
set up the conditions under which language might even begin to be
spoken. As Judith Butler has stated, “the point has never been that
‘everything is discursively constructed’; that point, when and where
it is made, belongs to a kind of discursive monism or linguisticism
that refuses the constitutive force of exclusion, erasure, violent fore-
closure, abjection, and its disruptive return within the very terms of
discursive legitimacy.”74

53
 Chapter One

Words more than signify; they affect and effect. Whether read or
heard, they complexly pulse through bodies (live or dead), render-
ing their effects in feeling and active response. They are a first level
of animation, one in which we deeply linguistic creatures attached
to our own language are caught, but not the last. Indeed, language
is but one discourse among many in a cacophony of anti-­, re-­, and
mis-­coordinations between objects, things, and beings. It sometimes
only sees itself; if it sees outside of itself, it sometimes responds only
with itself; and it sometimes must be left altogether, perishing in the
nonlanguage the moment demands. If we think only about insult and
effect, injury and response, then language, for all its special invest-
ments, cannot suffice as the final agent or medium by which any of
these is actuated.
George Allen lost his campaign by an animation not only of language
but also of image and technology: the video of his social and political
infractions “went viral.” It was recognized as potentially damaging by
his opponent’s campaign, which released it strategically, but precisely
who and how many viewed it could not have been planned. That is,
the video bore a kind of animate liveness in its collectivity, as well as in
the unpredictability of the precise paths of that uptake: hence, a rhizo-
matic virality. Jimmy Lai suffered retribution in the similarly anti-­viral
actions taken by investors of his publishing company after 1997, when
China reacquired Hong Kong as a special administrative region: they
feared that if they remained attached, retribution could be eventually
taken on their media enterprises, and so disassociated from Lai’s com-
pany before it was too late.
Ultimately, animacy remains an unfixed notion. Linguists’ humility
before this elusiveness speaks to both disciplinarity’s hopeful possi-
bility (since exhaustive attempts still remain humble before the pos-
sibility of other disciplinary studies) and the failure of disciplinarity
(to achieve the final mastery of its objects, if and when it ever hopes
to do so). Animacy’s slipperiness here is beneficial for another rea-
son: it serves as a reminder of the transformative importance of trans-
nationality and migration. Consider that number can play a part in
determining animacy. Fortunate mismatches can occur for second-­
language English speakers who might not give a damn about whether
proper number marking (singular or plural) or proper pronominal
gender has been applied (as has been the case with my Chinese im-
migrant parents), and animacy’s effects need not have anything to do

54
 Language and Mattering Humans

with intentionality either. In this transnational case, ontologies are

interrupted, faced with their own instability, since sentience, agency,
and control relations are thus remapped, vitalizing some linguistic
referents and devitalizing others. Animacy’s slipperiness in such cir-
cumstances suggests, from a new direction, the troubled consolidation
of the (Western) subject.
Resorting to questions of universality is not my interest here; it suf-
fices to note that animacy seems to be around, pressing itself into lin-
guistic materiality (and in this hesitant validation I am no different
from various linguists who are still wondering what it is, even if it
“stays around”). Rather, the question is: why—or rather, how—does
animacy matter, both in the critical and political sense? And, perhaps,
what are the limits (analogical or otherwise) of a linguistic analysis?
The shortest answer is that if animacy gradations have linguistic con-
sequences and linguistic consequences are always also political ones,
then animacy gradations are inextricably political. Language tells us
of shared priorities (cognitive or not) and material-­linguistic econo-
mies, in which some “stuff ” emerges and other “stuff ” remains in-
effable, unmaterialized. The sentience of a noun phrase has linguis-
tic and grammatical consequences, and these consequences are never
merely grammatical and linguistic, but also deeply political.
This was a chapter primarily about language and its role in insults,
involving combinations of animality and objectification, as well as an
account of what might enliven and give language its force: animacy.
Animacy is a craft of the senses; it endows our surroundings with life,
death, and things in between. In the chapter that follows, I continue
my investigation of the linguistic notion of animacy to consider in-­
depth the term queer as it has migrated over time through various parts
of speech; in doing so, I ask how its animacy has been figured and re-
deployed.

55
 2
Queer Animation

How might a term cast off its dehumanization? That is, how might a
historically objectifying slur like queer be reanimated? And to open the
question well beyond identitarian resistive actions such as reclaim-
ing, why are some people (including academics) still using queer with
regularity? Though queer was highly controversial and its linguistics
were hotly debated for many years, it appears in many ways to have
settled. Still, it bears asking how this word has traveled in various lin-
guistic economies since its wary entry into the spheres of academic
and political discourse twenty years ago. I examine this question from
a cognitive-­linguistic perspective, one explicitly attentive to animacy,
to shed new light on these debates.
This chapter—the second half of a part on words—thus stays in the
realm of language, engaging animacy as it concerns the circulation of
queer as a political and sexual, and now guardedly institutional, term.
Queer’s institutionality can be found singly in titled academic pro-
grams (for example, “queer studies”) or as part of such programs (for
example, lgbtq), as well as in a proliferation of conferences and talk
series, in colleges and universities. It is also used today to name some
political organizations (Queers Against War). In academic practice,
it is found in humanities scholarship less as a name that designates an
identity or group than as an analytic and method; indeed, throughout
this book I use the word queer as such. The most telling sign of queer’s
institutionalization is the current circulation of terms like postqueer
in discussions of the “after of sex” and the “after” of identity, though
 Chapter Two

this also signals skepticism toward the strictures that even a seemingly
broad category such as queer can impose. Hoping to revise the term’s
historical dependence on “totalizing” notions of subjectivity, Carla
Freccero advocates for, “rather than an after of sex, . . . a return to
questions of subjectivity and desire, to a postqueer theoretical criti-
cal analysis of subjectivity that brings together . . . psychoanalysis and
other analytics and objects of study.”1
Twenty years after the institutional embrace of queer by way of sig-
nal conferences and publications naming “queer theory” and “queer
performativity,” this chapter assesses queer’s political uptake as a lin-
guistic object, specifically with regard to its being understood as “re-
claimed,” simultaneously the object and means of political trans-
formation. My discussion investigates its semantic and grammatical
proliferation, plumbing the relationship between queer’s particular and
changing semantics, its social and political forms, and the productive
terms of its animacy. I argue that in micro- and macropolitical worlds
in the United States, queer has followed the two contradictory paths of
re-­animation (beautiful collectivity/assemblage/reengagement of self
with animate force) and de-­animation, which might help to explain the
widespread fatigue with queer identity politics and internal racisms.
I do so by focusing not on the politics of a monolithic queer, but
rather on the politics of polyvalence that are instituted in part by the
“bleeding” of queer into diffuse parts of speech, as well as by examin-
ing the social technologies of those parts of speech in fine detail. By
focusing on animacy, I wish to veer away from simply repeating the
almost glibly reproduced, yet generally underinvestigated, story that
there are many people of color who reject the term queer because of
the term’s racism and false promise of intersectionality. This is not to
deny that such conditions have existed—indeed, the political lever-
aging of queer in certain contexts and not in others followed quite
predictable paths of exclusion—but to think more precisely about the
linguistic conditions that helped this be so.

A Queer Word
To begin, we have to ask whence the queer that got “reclaimed.” This is
relevant not only because there are those who claim that a word’s his-
toricity has direct bearing on its current affectivity (consider Judith
Butler’s discussion of queer’s iterability in and through its traumatic

58
 Queer Animation

history),2 but because its future efflorescences do not emerge ran-

domly. Stories of queer’s origins vary. Many documentations of the
word yield—in that circular way that majoritarian terms, forces, and
normativities reproduce themselves—primarily dominant and even
somewhat exclusive (hence, their own homonormative) histories of
queer. Despite the performative possibility that these histories may re-
iterate dominant traces, I cautiously use these histories as a starting
point, because they revealingly tell of the undeniably privileged pro-
cess of queer’s reclamation. But I also, somewhat forgivingly, ask what
might productively remain of today’s queer’s enduring potencies, not
least of which is the growing institutionalization of queer of color
scholarship, which might be said to save queer from its own willful
mobilities.
I take advisedly the words of E. Patrick Johnson, who writes of the
failure of dominant forms of queer (and queer theorizing) to contend
with cultural positionality, particularly that of race and class privilege.
Johnson suggests drawing from African American vernacular quare,
not to provide yet another queering of the queer, but rather to re-
link it to certain priorities, for instance, to restore a materialist sensi-
bility to the term and its scholarship.3 Compared to queer, published
linguistic histories of African American quare are nearly nonexistent;
indeed, in a seeming acknowledgment of this, Johnson brilliantly
patches together an etymological entry specific to African American
usage that both acknowledges the Oxford English Dictionary’s elision of
African American quare (it mentions only the Irish English quare) and
affirms “curious” links with “black” Irish and the “blackness” of the
Irish.4 Instead of the tack Johnson takes, one that might be described
as “an alternative lexical investment” that comes with its own correc-
tives, I confront queer directly and work from there.
There are two majoritarian stories of the English-­language queer’s
(re-­)emergence: First, there is that of the Oxford English Dictionary,
which relies on documented written use (and, hence, casts out entire
histories of oral forms of documenting) and can only paint broad out-
lines of the political arbitrators of its semantics. Second, there are also
more specific political-­linguistic histories drawn by queer scholarship,
which—even as or because so many of these cite the oed in a conven-
tion of the defining genre—frequently leave behind linguistic detail
in the interest of privileging queer’s masterly slipperiness, its aporetic
quandaries. In the hope of bridging this gap, I instead extend and ex-

59
 Chapter Two

pound on a word now so commonly voiced that it threatens to dis-

solve into background noise.
For centuries in English usage, the word queer did not seem to exist
consistently as a noun before the turn of the twentieth century (spe-
cific dates are inconclusive). According to the oed, at least in the sig-
nificantly widespread English senses that it tracks, where queer existed
adjectivally, there were two main adjectival lexemes. Its primary ad-
jective modified an object to mean “strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric,
in appearance or character. Also, of questionable character, suspicious,
dubious”; secondarily, “Out of sorts; unwell; faint, giddy. Formerly
also (slang): drunk (obs.).” Note though that besides the still-­extant
nonsexualized or gendered verbal use of queer, which according to the
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language means to “spoil or
ruin” or to “put someone in a hopeless or disadvantageous position,”
we also find contemporary crystallizations of both adjectival and ver-
bal forms of the earlier sense of queer in the idiomatic British phrases
queer street, meaning “where the debtors live,” and queer the pitch, mean-
ing “ruin the plan” or “spoil the chances of success.”5 Debra Burring-
ton patches together the senses of Queer Street (not yet understood as
involving debtors) as “an imaginary street where people in difficulties
are supposed to reside” and as “strange, odd,” the first sense of the pri-
mary adjectival lexeme.6 Its third sense, now apparently dominant in a
way that renders the other senses obsolete, indicates homosexuality:7
colloq. (orig. U.S.). Of a person: homosexual. Hence: of or relating
to homosexuals or homosexuality. Although originally chiefly
derogatory (and still widely considered offensive, esp. when used
by heterosexual people), from the late 1980s it began to be used as a
neutral or positive term (originally of self-­reference, by some homo-
sexuals; cf. QUEER NATION n. and also quot. 1952 at QUEER n. 2) in
place of gay or homosexual, without regard to, or in implicit denial
of, its negative connotations. In some academic contexts it is the
preferred adjective in the study of issues relating to homosexuality
(cf. queer theory n. at Special uses 2); it is also sometimes used of
sexual lifestyles that do not conform to conventional heterosexual
behaviour, such as bisexuality or transgenderism.8
Such uses have been recorded since the beginning of the twentieth
century. The second queer is restricted to the qualifying rubric “crimi-
nals’ slang” and it included the now-­obsolete (mid-­sixteenth century

60
 Queer Animation

through the mid-­nineteenth) adjectival sense “bad; contemptible,

worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable.” It came with a cautionary
note that mentions the otherwise obvious fact that “the exact sense
varies with the noun to which the adjective refers.” This second sense
is followed in prominence by the adjectival “of coins or banknotes:
counterfeit, forged,” followed by the nominal “forged or counterfeit
money. Also in extended use.”
The segregation of queer into two lexemes suggests that lexicolo-
gists consider these as homophones or otherwise semantically remote
senses, rather than as a single polysemous queer, raising questions about
the social, ontological, and interpretive gaps between normative lan-
guage and “criminals’ slang” on the one hand, and normative language
users and criminals on the other. (Did homosexual criminals not have
a slang term for themselves? Were homosexuals already unimaginable
to criminals who were already in some sense queer?)9 Not waiting
for a lexicological resolution or simply ignoring the judgment of ho-
mophony, queer theorists have had good fun with the play between
the notions of fraudulent capital and illegitimate sexual bodies.10
In the 1910s and 1920s, according to the historian George Chauncey,
gay men generally resisted queer’s effeminizing connotations in the
larger culture of the United States, choosing instead fairy to denote the
same and permitting the self-­identificatory queer to align with mascu-
linity.11 Then, owing in part to nationalist impulses existing from the
crisis of the stock-­market crash in 1929 through the alarmist and para-
noid McCarthy era, in which heteronormativity was held up as a nec-
essary condition for national strength and survival, queer narrowed in
a number of contexts—not abandoning the “former” sense, but exist-
ing beside it—to mean sexually nonnormative, whether in behavior,
affect, or biology.12 This narrowed use was indeed negative and hence
tended not to be used among gays or lesbians; for men at least, gay was
the new preferred term.
By the 1970s, perhaps incited by the increased interest in recog-
nition by the wider public, the word queer began to be used again,
self-­referentially, by some gay men. The aids political activism of the
1980s and 1990s led to a newly urgent push for gay visibility; linguis-
tically, this meant that striking, compact, and confrontational slogans
and images were politically foregrounded. The aids crisis accelerated
the strategic use of the word queer to encompass a broad and multi-
faceted population.13 The linguistic politics of Queer Nation and act

61
 Chapter Two

3. Queer Nation in action at the inauguration of the California governor

Pete Wilson, 1991. Photo by Marc Geller.

up echoed its resistance to compromise and complacency: consider

the oft-­cited slogan “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get Used to It!” A
photo from a Queer Nation rally in 1991 shows a racially diverse group
of gay men wielding such a sign, some of them clad in T-­shirts embla-
zoned with other contested slang, such as dyke and fag (figure 3). Such
an image is an important reminder that the history of queer, while
today understood by scholarship as particularly laden with exclusions,
has also been a significant rallying cry and point of coalition building,
one that both summoned and ironized the “nation” as the primary site
of shared affinity.14
Early consumer-­capitalist forays inside some gay male commu-
nities led to a humorous offshoot, somewhat ignorant of its own
class politics: “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Let’s Go Shopping!”15 Dis-
cussions about queers’ relationship to capital are ongoing, recently
most densely around the notion of “homonormativity.”16 Lisa Dug-
gan’s sense of homonormativity refers to a neoliberalism that has the
ability to absorb and indeed deploy homosexuality for its purposes.
Within this framework, queer consumer capitalism falls neatly in line
with (neo-­)liberal ideologies and subject formations.17 Queer activ-
ist groups contesting the normativization and prioritizations of gay

62
 Queer Animation

capital have formed and remain active today, for example, the group
Queers for Economic Justice. Today, queer’s generic adjectival mean-
ing of “strange” continues, albeit in limited discourses, alongside the
“sexual” meaning, which is presently conversant with gay, lesbian, bi-
sexual, transgender, and other nonnormative sexual identities. There
are now increased nominal senses of queer: uses like “all the young
queers” are not only grammatically acceptable but widespread.

Fraught Institutionalizations, Fraught Reclamations

Within the United States, the term queer has been cautiously accom-
modated in the academy as queer studies has, in some regards, solidi-
fied into a field, though it remains very much a rangy, interdisciplinary
nexus of interests, objects, and methodologies. There are now queer
studies programs, minors, and fellowships at institutions throughout
the country. It has partially displaced “lesbian and gay studies,” which
has been a rubric since at least the early 1970s; the first courses in queer
studies were taught at the San Francisco City College in 1972. This
efflorescence of queer’s uptake in academia, and the concomitant in-
stitutionalization it signals, is in part due to the cross-­fertilization of
activism and academic intellectual concerns.
A brief examination of the history of the moniker queer studies indi-
cates that not everyone has equally embraced the term. In her book
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, published in 1987, Gloria An-
zaldúa explicitly refused to separate queerness from race, preferring
mestiza queer. She had an incisive critique of the term’s relations: both
queer and mestiza( je) are crossroads, but queer can erase race.18
Anzaldúa’s important and somewhat less salubrious observation
about queerness, that it was threatened not, for instance, by inspecifi-
city, but by whiteness itself, was an early caution that did not see sig-
nificant recognition until much later. Even then, she did not reject
the term altogether; she used it in a way that was prescient of later
coalitional queer politics. In her earlier poem “La Prieta,” published in
1981 in This Bridge Called My Back, she defined queer as operating inter-
sectionally and well beyond sexuality: “We are the queer groups, the
people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor
completely within our own respective cultures. Combined we cover
so many oppressions. But the overwhelming oppression is the collec-
tive fact that we do not fit, and because we do not fit we are a threat.

63
 Chapter Two

Not all of us have the same oppressions, but we empathize and iden-
tify with each other’s oppressions. We do not share the same ideology,
nor do we derive similar solutions.”19
Four years later, as follow-­up to a conference in 1990 in which she
discussed the interruptions of the term, Teresa de Lauretis edited a
special issue of the feminist journal differences that signaled one shift
from lesbian and gay to queer; its title, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexu-
alities, is often mentioned as a proposition for a field, a turning point in
the history of “queer theory.”20 Anzaldúa’s texts are not hailed as key
origin points in this history,21 though they predate de Lauretis’s text,
a historicizing which some critics attribute to the invisible operations
of whiteness. In the history of queer theorizing, these three textual
moments could indeed serve as examples of the hesitant lag time of
the mainstream adoption within queer theory of enterprises of queer
theory by people of color.
In her article “Critically Queer,” which appeared in the premiere
issue of glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and placed “queer” at
the center of a journal whose very name reiterated the importance of
maintaining the terms gay and lesbian, Judith Butler examined some of
the currents within contemporary politics and theory that gave this
term its critical purchase.22 The early 1990s in particular was a time
when terms like queer were cautiously embraced as “more than just
new labels for old boxes”; for academics such as Duggan, writing in
1992, the designations of Queer Nation and Queer Theory “carry with
them the promise of new meanings, new ways of thinking and acting
politically—a promise sometimes realized, sometimes not.”23 In 1993,
Michael Warner wrote an assessment that feels dated in its wonder-
ment but reiterates current mystifications of queer’s indeterminacy,
commenting on the word’s purchase but also its potential difficulty:
“The preference for ‘queer’ represents, among other things, an aggres-
sive impulse of generalization; it rejects a minoritizing logic of tol-
eration or simple political interest/representation in favor of a more
thorough resistance to regimes of the normal . . . its brilliance as a
naming strategy lies in combining resistance on [the] broad social ter-
rain with more specific resistance on the terrains of phobia and queer-­
bashing, on one hand, or of pleasure, on the other. ‘Queer’ therefore
also suggests the difficulty in defining the population whose interests
are at stake in queer politics.”24
Finally, in 1993, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick evocatively depicted queer
as “fraught”: “A word so fraught as ‘queer’ with so many social and

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personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement . . .

never can only denote; nor can it only connote; a part of its experi-
mental force as a speech act is the way in which it dramatizes locution-
ary position itself.”25 Thus, Sedgwick alleged that queer’s denotative
meaning cannot simply be treated independently of its many conno-
tations (what she calls “social and personal histories of exclusion, vio-
lence, defiance, excitement”). It is worth noting that for some women,
the recent use of queer to refer to all genders (as well as a spectrum of
sexualities that includes bisexuality) is seen as a problematic erasure
of the specificity of lesbianism akin to the false neutrality of using
the word man as an ostensible generic for all humans. Some also feel
that women are erased when gay is no longer used alongside its usual
companion phrase, and lesbian, and is used a singular, gender-­inclusive
term.26
Given this complexity, to say that queer was “reclaimed” (as one
might say in an introductory queer studies or sociolinguistics course),
regardless of its status in either institution or populace, is not only
somewhat reductive; it is to promulgate a certain kind of linguistic
politics. It raises the questions: what event denotes the achievement
of that reclamation? Its first attempts? Its widespread use by younger
generations of a group? The quality of its affectivity? Its use by the
largest possible population beyond the group’s borders? For such
questions, turning to existing scholarship on racial and ethnic rec-
lamation can be informative. Black, for instance, has been held up by
some (but not all) linguists as a premier example of successful recla-
mation, because it can now be used referentially, without risk of insult
or self-­abnegation. In 1977, the linguist Geneva Smitherman wrote
that “the term ‘black’ had achieved widespread usage and acceptance
by both blacks and whites,” though she acknowledged that “there are
some blacks, especially older ones, who do a double flinch at being
called ‘black.’ You see, they remember when black was not so beau-
tiful.”27 Yet we must also note that by this account of reclaiming, it
would seem that the goal of reclaiming is a deflated neutrality, essen-
tially a loss of the word’s affective valences. According to the linguist
Hans Hock:
Just as with tabooed words, the response until recently consisted in a
constant turnover in the words designating Afro-­Americans, ranging
from “Ethyopian,” “African,” “Colored,” “Negro,” “Afro-­American”
to the six-­letter obscenity still commonly used as a term of insult.

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This linguistic turnover was in the nineteen-­seventies brought to a

halt by a conscious and deliberate redefinition of the word “black”:
Where previously this word had negative and derogatory conno-
tations, even among Afro-­Americans, it was now redefined by the
“Black-­Power Movement” as a word with neutral or even positive
connotations, completely on a par with the word “white” which had
traditionally been employed in reference to Americans of European
origin. And since then it has replaced all its predecessors, includ-
ing Afro-­American, as the most commonly used, neutral term for
Americans of African descent.28
Such a view comes closest to an idealized assimilationist perspective,
more along the lines of “civil rights” inclusion than, in fact, Black
Power’s antiestablishment aims (in this schema, the reclamation of
nigger or nigga would seem far less promising).
In light of the linguistic possibilities for assimilation and neutral-
ization, I am interested in queer liberalism’s own schema, similar to
that of civil rights, and its regulation of affect in debates on gay mar-
riage as a way to probe queer’s place in the terrain of politics in the
United States. David Eng writes that “under the banner of freedom
and progress, queer liberalism . . . becomes linked to a politics of
good citizenship, the conjugal marital couple, and the heteronorma-
tive family.”29 He further argues that queer liberalism deploys race
while erasing its traces. If queer could be reclaimed to the point that
it is fully absorbed and assimilated, then what would a neutral queer
look, feel, sound, or taste like? Or—to indulge a bit further—a neu-
tered queer? I cannot ignore here the common understanding of ani-
mal neutering, perhaps made baldly obvious by the liberties taken
in its behavioristic approach to animals, that neutering is motivated
in part by a pet owner’s desire to flatten and redirect animal affect
(though I should note also that no holds were barred for intellectu-
ally disabled and poor black women subjected to sterilization). When
performed on pets, neutering is commonly understood to level tem-
peramental swings in relation to mating drives, thus helpfully neutral-
izing sexualized affect (I will more extensively address animal neuter-
ing and its gendered and biopolitical complexities in chapter 4). For all
that marriage is understood to organize and even encourage (private)
reproductive sexuality, gay marriage curiously conceives of itself as
having a gaping, inactive lacuna in sexuality’s place, exaggerating the
invisibilizing proprieties of straight marriage.

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It is notable that though there are many self-­identified “queers”

who would like to get married, perhaps in view of the continuing
“rub” of queer and its failure to denote compliance or the templatic,
“unadulterated” extension of rights, many same-­sex marriage advo-
cates—in mainstream organizations especially—have shunned trans
and intersex folks and other radical queers, as well as gays, lesbians,
and other queers of color.30 So do neutered queers become gays? If
only it were so simple. For neoliberal gayness has its own ghosts: in
an unambiguous indication of the perceived whiteness of homosexu-
ality (or the racism of neoliberal gayness),31 African Americans were
largely blamed by political liberals for the passage of Proposition 8
in California, which banned same-­sex marriage, though religion was
found to have played the determining role in the proposition’s out-
come.32 Queer is found nowhere in the slogans “Marriage Equality,”
“Freedom to Marry,” “Gay Marriage”; and only good neoliberal gay
and lesbian subjects “just like you,” mostly white, coupled, and with
children, are viewed on television ads in states where marriage laws
are in contention. Hardly visible are the childless sex radicals, inter-
racial threesomes, and leather queers. Is this perhaps because queer ani-
mates too much, exacerbates rather than contains frisson, soars be-
yond its bounds? Is an untamed queer—linguistic or embodied—still
beyond the ken of either sympathetic heteronormativities or neolib-
eral homonormativities? Beyond noting the heightened contradic-
tions it comprises, how might we assess its affectivity?

Lexical Acts
Against such flattening aspirations—the hope for a conclusory stage
of the past participial “reclaimed” to describe the linguistic neutering
success of an entire population—the linguist Arnold Zwicky produc-
tively prompts, “For which speakers, in which contexts, and for which
purposes has the word been reclaimed?” making it clear that for lexi-
cographers it is the many, often contested senses of a word that must
be documented.33 Thus, for instance, when we say that “queer is an ad-
jective,” we either neglect its occasional use as a noun or simply mean
to mark its predominant sense. Linguistic creativity drives semantic
language change, and nearly any lexical item, unless especially con-
strained as a delimited grammatical operator, is likely to have mul-
tiple senses, some of which may fall into different parts of speech.
What could look like linguistic creativity to some reads as “failure”

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or misunderstanding to others; but it is hard to tell the difference be-

tween these two, and indeed the ubiquity of the language innovation
that emerges from linguistic mixing suggests that they not be differ-
entiated. Even the preposition over, something commonly thought
of as a simple grammatical operator, has many different senses, some
of which contradict each other. In “the house over the bridge,” over
scans an imagined trajectory and is hence qualitatively different from
its positional sense in “the bee hovers over the flower,” which in turn
differs from the gravitational wrapping sense of “I draped it over the
dining table.”34 This sense multiplicity cannot be any less true of queer
and, even more interestingly, its mythical opposite, straight.
If we talk about primary senses, or shifts in the strength of one
sense versus another, then still another specification must be made:
the population of language users for whom these shifts are rele-
vant. What is, after all, a queer “community”? Contemporary self-­
identifying queer “communities” grew at least partly out of gay and
lesbian coalitions in the 1980s who began self-­referring as queer. Since
the early 1990s, queer communities are touted to include all forms of
sexual minority: homosexual men, lesbian women, bisexuals, trans-
vestites, transsexuals, transgender folk, bdsm/leatherfolk, and others
who simply identify with nonnormative sexual practices or interests.
Queer theory and activism of course profoundly informed how
queer was meant politically. Ideally, queer identity is inclusive of those
who continue to fall “in between” majoritarian, heteronormative
categories of identity, particularly interstitial sexualities and genders.
Within the narrower confines of queer writing in academia, queer is
cannily understood (or, according to a number of dissenters, only
aspires to be understood) as probing beyond the bounds of norma-
tivity, taking on the load of rejection, resistance, negativity, indiscre-
tion, quirkiness, and marginalization. For instance, Sedgwick suggests,
“Queer can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps,
dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the
constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t
made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”35
Continuing Sedgwick’s compendium of interstitial possibilities,
David M. Halperin writes, “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds
with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in
particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an
essence.”36 Though “identity without an essence” could describe any

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distinctive adjective, when considered in queer theoretical terms, this

seems a lovely formulation. For all practical purposes, we could say
that identities are by and large nominal (that is, they are referred to
using nouns or noun phrases). For instance, one cannot use a verb
to identify, unless it is nominalized: “I am a lover, not a fighter.” One
might translate Halperin’s formulation in linguistic terms to mean
that queer is something like “an adjective without a noun to modify,
disguised as a noun.” In such a view, queer launches into perpetuity
with its very own linguistic identity crisis, compelling its readers to
epistemological vagaries in a “not-­yet” that suspends both ontologi-
cal conviction and the possibility of proper legibility. If this is so, then
not only are the identificatory signifiers mobile, but the subjects who
pronounce them are too: in this idealized view, subject positions are
up for grabs.
In linguistic terms, we might say that adjectival queer’s function is
to modify an attached (implicit or explicit) noun concept, in particu-
lar, to select the peripheral aspects of meaning of, say, concepts such
as heterosexuality or sexuality.37 Adjectival queer therefore acts to shift
meaning to the side of a normative interpretation, away from mean-
ings associated with the notional center. Besides its “denotatively per-
verting” meaning, queer’s apparent mobility of meaning benefits fur-
ther from its more prevalent grammatical use as an adjective rather
than a noun. Adjectival queer is hence a function. If, for Halperin, queer
is an identity, then it is this function which has been refigured into
an identity. While queer theory’s questioning of what is “natural” re-
sembles, and likely inherits from, feminist inquiries about what is
considered “natural” about women (and the ways in which women
themselves are produced as “nature”) it also departs from dominant
feminisms in the United States (which remain attached to the category
of “woman”) in its refusal, by promulgation, if not in action, to advo-
cate or politically favor any particular category other than the (sexu-
ally) nonnormative.
Indeed, many queer theorists reject the “nonessentialist” or “anti-
essentialist” postures of queer politics, suggesting that it is just as es-
sentialist as any other since it poses an essential and identificational
“queer” against an implicitly essential “heterosexual.”38 Thus, queer
theory has been perceived to shift between the positions that “we are
all queer/nonnormal/perverse” and the stance that heteronormativity
is false, pervasive, and oppressive. But looking further into the linguis-

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tic nature of queer, we see that its animacy—insofar as it is deployed,

with some contestation, as a noun—opens into a much more complex
situation than this binary model suggests.

Tracking Queer Animacies

If certain words are deemed proper to only certain users, queer has for
many been historically associated with a proper user of only injuri-
ous intent. I earlier noted that today, under certain circumstances, ex-
plicit identificatory statements such as they’re queer or I didn’t know I was
talking to a queer have been used in ways that refer to the generalized
queer identity without an apparent affective impulse (derogation, in-
tensity, or clearly negative or positive value). Furthermore, these uses
have not necessarily been delivered ironically or used to make salient
political statements.
We can further note that the use of queer as a noun rather than an
adjective is characteristic of another trend: the de-­adjectival nomi-
nalization of the sexual-­identity sense of queer. The nominalization of
queer as a member of an (identity) group is also accompanied by the
relatively widespread appearance of the verbal use of queer, especially
but not limited to queer scholarship, with meanings that pointedly
refer to sexuality and gender. Examples began to proliferate in the
early 1990s; for instance, Jonathan Goldberg’s methodologically rep-
resentative words in the introduction to his anthology Queering the
Renaissance, published in 1993, in which he comments that the essays
seek to “queer the renaissance . . . in the recognition that queer iden-
tity is far less easily regulated or defined in advance than legislatures
and courts imagine, and that literary texts are far more available to
queer readings than most critics would allow or acknowledge.”39 Out-
side of academia, the Canadian “Queers United Against Kapitalism”
claims, “We seek to queer the radical community and to radicalize the
queer community”; queer becomes at once a noun and an adjective
here, as well as an action verb. If queer was previously understood to
be a “dehumanizing” slur figuring its subjects as abject or “lesser than,”
this formerly “objectifying” term has taken a life of its own, with the
power to animate some other object. Here this is meant quite literally,
since grammatically speaking an action verb sets the object of the sen-
tence into motion, engages its capacity to be affected. Arguably, the
word in some vital ways is thus deobjectified.

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If these observations are evidence of a referential and linguistically

diversifying trend within queer groups by now well known, this trend
simultaneously signals at least a partial attenuation of queer’s deroga-
tory force. At the same time that queer theorists use the word freely
in all manner of institutional contexts, statistics from the National
School Climate Survey in 2009, compiled by an advocacy network of
queer educators and their allies, reports that queer still carries a sting
for many, especially in middle and high schools in the United States,
where nearly 85 percent of all self-­declared lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender students report being verbally harassed by their peers,
with over 40 percent physically harassed because of sexual orientation.
Queer (along with dyke and fag) is still widely mobilized as a popular,
and stinging, insult among youths.40 We have a mass of senses and a
mass of affects: how to apprehend these denotative, connotative, and
affective contradictions, short of throwing up our hands and saying
“everything’s contested” or ignoring them altogether?
At this point, I turn to cognitive linguistics to provide an analysis
of the uneven status—reclaimed or not—of queer, an analysis of its
different grammatical use-­functions and their divergent paths. I sug-
gest that the observations made by queers/gays/lesbians of color that
queer identity and nomination tended toward white essentialisms can
be substantiated from a cognitive-­grammar perspective that considers
closely not only the failures of linguistic representation and reference,
but more centrally how linguistic usage manifests and innovates in
direct relationship to grammar.
Since queer now appears in different word classes, particularly as
a verb, adjective, and noun, it is useful to first examine cognitive-­
linguistic characterizations of generic word classes. While it is fairly
obvious that the availability of such a diversity of meanings for queer,
such as “different from normal,” “to change,” and “sexually identified
person,” is a result of queer’s proliferation in contemporary discourses,
it is less obvious how these senses are structured linguistically as ad-
jective, verb, and noun. For one thing, they possess radically differ-
ent temporalities. By and large, verbs are defined as processes, that is,
they are structured on some time relation (since things are dynamic:
change is inherent to a verb). On the other hand, nouns, adjectives, ad-
verbs, prepositions, and more are considered atemporal relations (they
describe fixed states or nonchanging operations). Furthermore, when
predications—the semantic structures corresponding to expressions—

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are relational, they involve the profiling (salience, emphasis) of inter-

connections; when they are nominal, they involve the profiling of a
given conceptual region.
One implication this has for language use is that words used accord-
ing to certain grammatical conventions will inspire conceptualizations
that have some slant or another, depending upon that convention:
for example, an expression that raised the ire of many a second-­wave
feminist, “who gives this woman away?” In it, the placement of a mar-
riageable woman (“this woman”) in a grammatical position as object
for the verb give effectively prescribes a processual operation on a con-
ceptual region: that is, it casts the referent of woman statically, as both
a notional object and in objective perspective, as the target of a dy-
namic “giving” process. This sounds much like objectification, though
it is of course just a microcosm of the ceremony; the gender of the
woman’s future spouse, for instance, may confer contradictory sub-
jectivity in other grammatical formations during the ceremony. From
another angle, using the same word in both the verbal position (“queer
the Renaissance”) and as a noun (“a Renaissance queer”) poses strongly
different constraints for how it can be conceptualized in relation to
action, agent, and animacy.
The lesson of both kinds of examples is that though some degree
of linguistic creativity is always possible between two speakers—­
including in my view the very salutary second-­language and dialectal
“violations” of standardized grammar—many basic grammatical con-
ventions are very difficult to violate while still being “understood”:
precisely because they are so conventional, they are likely to be taken
for granted. While for humanities scholars sometimes the most inter-
esting thing about language is that its constraints are not hermetic and
can thus be “failed” by “bad linguistic subjects,” I wish here to dem-
onstrate the creativity that works within and around such compelling
constraints. Animate theorists—my term for creative language users—
work within and around a set of given normativized targets, much
like José Esteban Muñoz’s rubric of disidentification.41 It is therefore
in relation to these targets—not with abandon—that queer can enliven
and animate itself; for all its self-­identification as nonnormative, there
is nothing magical about queer that releases it from trucking with the
conventions and norms of language itself. What I want to show is that
some of these conventions and norms are precisely grammatical: I can
then elucidate what is the substance of queer’s artful innovation in its

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political context in the United States and also show where it missed
grammar to undercut its own twisty aims.
Queer has been animated—and continues to animate (to more or less
effect, as I show later)—across a range of meanings, especially in the
context of its participation in a political movement. Political move-
ments whose strategies include institutionalization or institutional
recognition are generally hard pressed to avoid collective nomination
entirely. As long as one must articulate a political demand on the basis
of a group of persons, a “we” (whether in the form of “we want,” “we
demand,” or the often problematic “for them”) in some way entitles
itself, particularly in the rights frameworks of liberal democratic poli-
tics. That “we” claims to have some characteristic that, under some
generalized cultural frame of rights and privileges, relates it to an-
other a group that already enjoys legitimation or privilege. The lin-
guist and cultural theorist Geneva Smitherman, in the context of her
important work about black language, has written about the cultural
valences of the naming of “African Americans” in the era after the
civil rights movement as a way of enlivening a “we” that politically
aligns with, and hence joins, a network of either multicultural ethnic
or transnational immigrant groups.42 John Baugh discusses the lin-
guistic strategies in the changing adoption patterns of the adjectives
black and African American, especially with regard to self-­reference in
the dynamic racial landscape of the United States.43 Both Smither-
man’s and Baugh’s findings address the political utility of the terms of
choice for their speakers and the understood promise of the political
demands they can achieve, which sometimes depends on their seman-
tic distance from the feckless terrain of abjection.
In the case of queer, naming a perhaps previously inchoate group of
individuals as a collective body (that is, creating a noun to contain and
welcome), while announcing who is to be welcome, is a preeminent
substantiation that puts a group materially on the terrain of politics
and, in one fell swoop, seems to make an identity, one that becomes
available for conceptual partaking by individuals. This making-­on-­
the-­go, rather than a sober reflection of who is, runs from the opti-
mistic to the utopian. I will say more on this later, along the lines of
the collectivizing politics of nominalization.
Politicized group descriptions—that is, descriptions in part lever-
aged for political engagement—are also under pressure to be linguis-
tically economical (for example, as in a “sound bite” or a “motto”).

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Hence, one is likely at some point or another to name persons, whether

individuals or groups, by the descriptive adjectives used to character-
ize that group or its political assertions. How is this done? In formal
terms, naming occurs by nominalization, which is defined as a shift,
with minimal change in form or conceptual characterization, toward
noun status from another word class, or by a combination of any set
of word forms to form a composite noun.
There are, in addition, purely linguistic pressures, that is, pressures
outside of specific cultural or political demands, for noun forms to
be innovated. These demands of expression range from the relative
articulatory expediency of a single noun form (queer) over adjective-­
noun combinations (as in queer person), to the relative subcategori-
zational independence of a noun over other word classes (transitive
verbs subcategorize for, and hence “seek” for their completion gram-
matical subjects and objects; adjectives and adverbs subcategorize for,
and hence “need,” nouns and verbs respectively; and so on). Nomi-
nalizations will function to fix, stabilize, and, most crucially, enable
bounding, especially for countable nouns. The fixing and stabilizing
normally comes from deverbalization. If a noun transposes from a
verbal form in particular, then basic dynamism—the verbal tempo-
ral aspect—is removed by dropping the verb’s inherent time relation-
ships, because that noun can then no longer be a process. Thus, to
use a word in such a way that befits nominal grammatical status (the
queers, or even, probably much more likely, noun phrases that include
the adjectival form of queer, as in “Queers for Christ”) is to encour-
age a bounded reading of the concept’s content, and hence—this is no
minor consequence—to render identities finite.
It is further, in cases of deverbal nominalization, to detemporalize
a form so that it refuses a dynamic reading. To the extent that nouns
can serve as identities, that is, to the extent that nouns invoke con-
ceptualizations that a person may identify with (“a bunch of queers”),
subordinating oneself to that identity is, I would argue, subjecting
oneself to the loss of dynamism, as well as to the boundedness of that
noun. While that person’s “self ” cannot be but a blend between that
person’s acquired identity—the prepackaged, sometimes stereotyped
identity—and the rest of their sense of self, to identify with such an
identity seems to me a genuine risk, for it is not clear which aspect
of self depends on which other. If noun meanings are less mobile, I
contend that they are arguably less “alive”; as notionally bounded sub-

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 Queer Animation

stantives, they have less capacity to animate elsewhere than to be acted

upon. At the same time, nouns are agents of action that “govern” the
grammar of a sentence; as we have seen, however, according to ani-
macy hierarchies’ inherent reasoning, some have less capacity to do
this than others.
It is worth noting further that verbs and adjectives can quite easily
be nominalized, either through innovation or through long-­term
development. For instance, the verb move may be bounded as a de-
verbal nominalization: Trent’s move went smoothly. Queer may be “fixed”
(opaquely, because it shows no phonological modification, and hence
betrays no cues toward its own modified meaning) in at least two
ways: first, the modifying adjectival queer can be nominalized by the
metonymic naming of the thing modified by queer with the modi-
fier itself, which is a common process (consider, for instance, call-
ing women blondes); second, the verbal queer (which may in itself be
formed by de-­adjectival verbalization, as in beautify or even yellow:
paint yellows when it ages) can undergo nominalization, as in “the
one who queers,” often realized phonologically by suffixation with -­er
(“the eater.”) Its nominal fixing can be compounded by pluralizations,
such as queers.

Queer’s Many Senses, or Grammars of Forgetting

In the diagrams that follow, figures 4(a) through 4(e) represent vari-
ous instantiations of queer. In most cases, these are relational concepts,
except for 4(b), verbal queer, which is a process comprising develop-
ments of relations along a time path. In cases 4(b) and 4(c), the land-
mark (lm) of a relation is that entity that is “being queered” by the
trajector. In cases 4(d) and 4(e), the landmark is an implicit “queered”
category; the trajector is a member of the category, situated non-
normatively in relation to the landmark.
We can define the images as follows. Figure 4(a) represents a proto-
typical use of the adjectival queer, as in queer theory. As an adjective, it
is a dependent structure in the sense that it requires a noun to modify.
The two concentric circles of the image suggest that the adjective
“selects” everything but the center of the noun category that it gram-
matically modifies. In 4(b), the queer-­theory verbal use, as in queer
the academy, shows a process: the trajector is the agent of the pro-
cess, for instance, the queer theorists; the landmark, “the academy,”

75
4. Queer’s many contemporary senses. Diagram by the author.
 Queer Animation

is “queered” with time: in the central relation, its normative center

is excised; in the rightmost relation, the “new,” peripheral region is
selected and made cognitively salient. Figure 4(c) shows the “resulta-
tive” deverbal nominal, the noun that can be made out of the land-
mark after its undergoing the verbal process of 4(b).
The interpretation, however, for 4(c), given that it conventionally
stands for the identity and not “academia” or some other concept, is
that the trajectors that have operated on that landmark through the
queering process have been the self, in case a queer casts his or her sexu-
ality as a matter of choice, or some external concept like society, in case
a queer chooses to describe oneself as having been “perverted” by out-
side forces. Note that 4(c) has lost its dynamic quality; it is fixed, time-
less. Figure 4(d) is another noun that can result by making a nominal
form directly out of the adjective. This is also a timeless relation. Here,
queer is a trajector who stands in a peripheral relation to the landmark
normative center. In 4(e), this de-­adjectival nominal is pluralized:
queers. All stand again in a peripheral relation to the central landmark.
Something has been missing in the account up to this point: the
preceding diagrams are somewhat utopian, representing an idealized
version of the meanings of queer, one perfectly in line with the inten-
tions of queer politics. They are optimistic, in particular, about the
presence of kinds of memory needed to “know” what queer means in
the way it is intended. As cultural terms, instances of the use of queer
invoke intracultural (and, hence, eccentric in many public or out-
group domains) frames of reference which may not, for all queers—
or in all contexts in which queers may appear—be so easily accessed;
and in their place other, more normative cultural frames may get in-
voked. One of these normative, cultural frames, which plays some
part (even if a contested one) in seemingly all identities formed in the
United States, is that of the neoliberal self: an entity that is autono-
mous (hence, nondependent) as well as responsibly self-­authored, and
one that owes no sense of its formation to a past trace in time.
Hence, it is in the public discourse (which again, is the risk of any
movement which reaches for the public word) that the atemporality of
a noun, and the atemporality of identities in the United States, collude
quite insidiously to cut identities off from their roots. This atempo-
rality might in fact be seen as itself bound up in queer ways of under-
standing time, historicity, and the discontinuities of the past within
the present.44 There are many forces that make this so, of course; I do

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not wish to be reductive, but I believe the quieter workings of linguis-

tic structure are less noticeable and, as such, certainly less available to
intervention. There is a further risk for the adjectival queer alone: the
very condition for its definition, that it be defined in relation to the norm,
is easily made opaque by a renormalization of the category queer itself,
which is that it too must have a center and a periphery. The brilliance
of political movements that have enforced center-­periphery struc-
tures on such complex entities as the nation, the people, and so on has
been that they take advantage by making implicit appeal to one folk
structure of categories: the belief that any given category is simplisti-
cally structured by an essence.45
According to cognitive-­linguistic findings, nearly all categories
seem to be arranged according to a center and periphery, or some kind
of radiality, with better or worse examples, to be played out in con-
text.46 In any category subject to this kind of structure, its presumed
center-­periphery character can be easily exploited as a basis for im-
plicit reasoning. For instance, it is easy to assume, unreflectively, that
one who is talking about the “center” of any given concept is perfectly
justified in doing so. So it is, in figure 5, that the population of queers,
under construal as a category, can easily slip from 5(a) to 5(b), “losing”
their relationality, or, more dramatically but no less plausibly, from
5(a) to 5(c), reinfused with dimensions of center and periphery.
Here, too, is a case where, for humans who use language convention-
ally, a nominal category can seem to “forget” its history, particularly
when there are not adequate supporting models (as in, for example, a
surrounding culture infused with queer sensibilities that would sup-
port the revisionary meanings of reclaimed queer). There is, in other
words, a way that the partiality of queer materiality has effects of for-
getting. While it first seems that restorative “forgetting”—the sponta-
neous imputation of normative category structure—could happen at
any time, and that there is an apparent ignorance of the other signi-
fiers present, it ultimately becomes clear that the surrounding social
and cultural context has everything to do with the affordances and
effectivities of semantic change.
The imputation of reclaiming to a group presupposes that the group
has been disempowered in some way and has an investment in regain-
ing agency. In Excitable Speech, Butler writes about linguistic “restag-
ing” and “appropriation,” with an emphasis on a broader set of struc-
tures that necessarily circumscribe subjectivity and agency.47 Butler’s

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 Queer Animation

5. Renormalization of category queer. Diagram by the author.

argument turns on the Freudian notion of repetition-­compulsion. For

Freud, a subject who has undergone trauma continues to experi-
ence a sequence of unconscious-­driven reenactments of that injury
(or rather, its condensed or displaced symbol). These reenactments
are called repetition-­compulsions, or “repetition with a difference.”
It is only through psychoanalytic work that the subject can bring
the trauma out of the unconscious, by “remembering, repeating, and
working-­through” (to cite the title of Freud’s relevant essay) the in-
jury to identify the original trauma, bringing it into consciousness
and thereby securing recovery from it.48 In engaging this Freudian
concept, Butler suggests we see reclaiming, or its wider phenomenon
(the repetition of “recited and restaged” injurious words), as a neces-
sity: “Indeed, their repetition is necessary (in court, as testimony; in
psychoanalysis, as traumatic emblems; in aesthetic modes, as a cultural
working-­through) in order to enter them as objects of another dis-
course.”49 Butler suggests that reclaiming is part of a broader, ongoing
resignification over which participating subjects cannot have sover-
eign control, and in which they cannot be fully aware of the terms of
resignification.
If queers are poised to “reclaim,” there is something to be reclaimed,
regained. We are thus invited to construe the group of queers as dis-
possessed, lacking, or associated in some way with loss.50 In queer
studies, loss’s associated categories of Freudian (processual and recov-
erable) mourning and (suspended) melancholia, trauma, disenfran-
chisement, and bodily alienation have all been addressed from per-
spectives of queer life and death (not least of all in consideration of

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 Chapter Two

the impact of aids) and liberal political life.51 To the extent that mem-
bers of the group “inherit” its grammatical character as identities, this
is a loss which is hardly chosen. In the case of the term black, the ready
associations of the color black, with all the flying signifiers of dark-
ness, death, and mourning, not to mention the racist logic of associa-
tive qualities such as poverty, dirt, and crime, means that the word
black is, while not necessarily tabooed, in a position to have to wrestle
with imposed abjection. Both queer and black, in many circumstances,
further permit negative loads, which, as already suggested, continue
today. And due in part to norms of politeness and the fear of linguistic
contagion, items with negative loads are only pronounceable in cer-
tain restricted conditions, for instance, in self-­descriptions or when
outward insult is intended. That is, if saying “queer” is like having
public sex, then linguistic contagion is very much at stake.
But there are ways that we also cannot treat black and queer similarly,
just as we cannot treat their related discourses of race and sexuality
the same way. Notwithstanding the insistence that many (sub-­)groups
appear to be practically and effectively left out by the identity label
queer, the label is itself rather queer. As a relatively recently consti-
tuted category of social identity (at least, in the present form that
is not gender-­specific), and as a category which only recently got a
name, queer may not enjoy “material” existence to the degree that,
say, racial categories do or the two dominant gender identities do.
In other words, the degree to which queerness has been woven into
mainstream schemas of materiality is still relatively minor.
There are a number of perspectives from which the category queer
may be understood to have an uncertain materiality. One is that its
pronouncement or textual appearance has some responsibility for
reifying it as a category; as both structuralist and poststructuralist
thinkers would agree, language is a singular device by which cate-
gories become “real.” If the frequency with which a term such as queer
appears in everyday speech and in prevalent media forms borders on
the insignificant, it would seem that the infrequent act of naming a
category for which there are no other names consigns it to a reduced exis-
tence, a reduced cognitive salience. In a cognitive linguistics perspec-
tive, there are direct relations between the possibility of lexicalization
(the engendering of a relationship between a phonological form and a
cognitive entity or concept in a linguistics community) and the degree
of cognitive entrenchment (the strength of a concept, as determined by

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 Queer Animation

its frequency of invocation).52 Lexicalization is a collectively shared

cognitive entrenchment (hence, a conventionalization) into an ex-
plicit linguistic form. The pairing of lexicalization and entrenchment
is one means by which a concept achieves social strength as a thinkable
thing.
Furthermore, what is the nature of the elements that are iterated? If
we put a naive meaning of materiality in conversation with notions of
presence, then the utterance of a name—as a manifestation of a con-
cept—may have significant import in queer contexts. Given the non-­
self-­evident membership of queer-­citing queers in the United States,
it is worth asking whether “queerness” may well be constituted as
more individuated, more verbal, and more on-­line (“live”) than other
kinds of identity whose utility as a “prepackaged”—entrenched, stan-
dard—social resource is more immediate.53 This near, or tremulous,
materiality does not seem to be easily explained away and has a curi-
ous resonance with the “criminal’s slang” meaning of fraudulence or
falsity, now declared obsolete. Indeed, “queerness’s” own celebrated
queer conditions of existence, which at first seem unique, are similarly
present and operative in other cases, but simply remain quiet or back-
grounded: for instance, fluctuating membership and unclear satisfying
conditions for membership. (What, after all, is “nonnormative” sexual
behavior?)
But queer’s semantics are both more and less complex than this,
as can be seen when we look to places other than where English is
spoken (as well as linguistic economies in which English plays only
a small part).54 For instance, the closest word for queer in commu-
nist China is tongzhi, which is the combination of two morphemes,
one meaning “same” (like the English prefixal homo-­) and the other
“intent.” This word ironically reappropriates—perhaps not only in a
cynical way—its earlier communist meaning of “comrade.” The Chi-
nese tongzhi thus requires that we take another look at our articu-
lation of homonationalisms or homonormativities—as Duggan and
Puar do, in different registers—as only a product of late-­capitalist mo-
dernities, as the next stage of incorporation of affective nationalist
heteronormativities by gays and lesbians.55 To take another example,
in Deaf communities in the United States, American Sign Language
signs for queer have shifted and changed along with political move-
ments. For instance, the derogatory sign for gay (the hand gesture for
the letter g made while touching the chin) is often defiantly avoided

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by queer Deaf subcultures, who instead preferred to finger spell either

gay or queer.56 What is more, a sign for transgender was quite recently
invented, in concert with a growing political community of deaf
transgender folks. The professional signer and queer artist Ric Owen
reports that some transgendered Deaf groups came together and, in
recognition of the paucity of sign language to capture trans life, inno-
vated their own sign: “In the past, asl didn’t really have specific signs
for transgender and transsexual. Quite often one sign was confusingly
used for both groups. As the Deaf transgendered community became
empowered and more organized, they held meetings and workshops
to address their concerns and issues. It was at one of these gatherings
that the members of the community discussed and created a new sign
to mean ‘transgender.’ The sign roughly looks like a flower closing on
the chest and while voiced as ‘transgender,’ its visual meaning is ‘to ac-
cept all parts of myself.’”57 “Transgender” has been taken up in a wide-
spread manner as an innovated sign by Deaf transfolks; it would hence
be dangerous to assume that the time of queer linguistic creation is
over, as if it mirrored the “death” of the linguistic turn in the humani-
ties. Innovations of sign, gesture, or word remain, of course, a vital
part of community formations and retain their power as trajectors of
meaning that not only illustrate but animate.

Governing Queer Animacy

Recall that with the “criminals’ slang” second variant of queer, the oed
lexicographers deemed it necessary to remind its readers, even though
it is true by definition of all adjectives, that “the exact sense varies
with the noun to which the adjective refers.” Why? I propose that
both senses of queer’s animacy inspired a rich exchange and a reactive
repetition of the rules by which language items should be bound. The
riddle assumes closure in the annals of the oed: Q: When must an ad-
jective behave as an adjective? A: When the exact sense varies with the
noun to which the adjective refers.
Queer, by its own mettle, both is and is not bound by such rules. It
has been both re-­animated and de-­animated. While it continually re-­
animates in new formations—thanks particularly to queer of color,
transnational, disability, and trans scholarship—it has also achieved
nominal fame as an identity; but it has simultaneously coalesced, got-
ten sticky, inertial, lost its animation and its drive in the context of the

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United States. Its nominal terminus along certain semantic paths has
led it to an atemporal staticization, a lack of cognitive dynamism, an
essential death, and a future imaginable only according to its modi-
fication by something else. At the same time, its essence is present by
fiat and too often lives as the body of its most audible or legible or
entitled asserters; transnationally it is subject to, and subjects others
to, the fixed temporality and identitarian U.S. centrism of what Paola
Bacchetta calls a “from-­Stonewall-­diffusion-­fantasy.”58 In some ways,
then, de-­animated queer seems to invoke white morbidity, coming
with the decreased vitality and increased objectification and alien-
ation of bourgeois capital (following Marx), and the vacuity of neolib-
eral or neoliberal Left politics (following Duggan). Who would want
this sort of de-­animated, defanged, or depoliticized queer (but homo-
normative aspirants)? Certainly, its vitality can change entirely—even
in its noun form—in the altered subcategorizational linguistic bio-
politics of mixed language spaces. But its terms are difficult to predict.
One wonders, for example, at the possibility of the contribution of
a borrowing of queer for China’s linguistic territory of sexual iden-
tity terms; indeed, Beijing’s Queer Film Festival was in its early years
canceled by the authorities. According to Chou Wah-­shan, tongzhi
(“comrade,” itself appropriated in 1989) already secures a collectivity
by “taking the most sacred [communist] title from the mainstream
culture,” affirming rather than rejecting a certain familial proximity
(as Chou claims is true of queer). Yet tongzhi (already) has queerlike
effects, since it “connotes an entire range of alternative sexual prac-
tices and sensitivities in a way that ‘lesbian,’ ‘gay,’ or ‘bisexual’ does
not.”59 Transnationally, queer’s linguistic expropriation and importa-
tion is subject to the subcategorizing requirements of its new host
language, while simultaneously being accountable for the temporal
politics of its claim, borne by the United States, to the status of the
“modern” in progressivist narratives of the globalizing gay.
However, within the deadening identity politics of the United
States, it is entirely healthful—part of a salutary technology of self—
that some queers of color reject the term queer as an identity. E. Patrick
Johnson was trenchant in obliquely referring to the Irish quare in gen-
erating his own etymology for African American quare. Indeed, the
“lost” sense in the oed, which is rarely mentioned, is precisely what
has been eclipsed in queer genealogies of queer: it is defined as an in-
tensifier (“b. Sc. and Irish English. As an intensifier: = quare adj. 2.”),

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 Chapter Two

lending intensity to that to which it is grammatically attached. This

is a linguistic governance entirely defined by animation, whereby a
lifely quality of animacy is magically transferred to another object in
its local instantiation.
How do we comprehend “dead nouns,” taking into consideration
the fact that work on linguistic animacy shows that the sentience of
a noun phrase in some sense has some control relation over the rest
of the utterance? Government is a linguistic term that refers to sub-
categorization of the templatic needs that a specific word requires (or
requests) for the rest of the utterance. The verb queer, for instance,
because it codes a direct action, “subcategorizes for,” or requires
a grammatical subject and a noun phrase direct object. It is useful
to turn here to Foucauldian governmentality, which he considered
alongside the key terms of security and population in his theorization of
the biopolitical. For Foucault, governmentality functioned as a rela-
tion between the technologies of self and technologies of domination
and was an exploration of the techniques of biopower; it was histori-
cized as a salient concern and rapidly materializing European phe-
nomenon in the sixteenth century.60
With the “government” of language, I wish to meditate not only
about dual meanings of the linguistic “subject” and the social-­critical
“subject,” as has been commonly done in the humanities complica-
tions of the long-­time central term subject (consider Emile Benveniste,
for instance, who located in the grammatical subject a foundation for
subjectivity),61 but also about the control relations of elements of lan-
guage in relation to the rest of an utterance. This allows us to move
away from subject and subjectivity as a question with (humanist,
rationalizing) restrictions and toward sentience—again, broadly con-
strued—as a decisive factor in the architecture of language. Though
governmentality has been carefully taken up by critical discourse
theorists such as Norman Fairclough,62 Foucauldian governmentality
has to my knowledge not been considered in relation to the strict sub-
categorizational governance of language, most relevant here to the
extent that I have studied queer’s emergence into parts of speech. The
verb form of queer, notably, does not subcategorize for either a high-­
animacy subject or a high-­animacy direct object; this is apparent in its
academic uses in a world of theoretical abstraction (“the prevalence of
alternative sexual formations queers heteronormative schemes”), but
was already present in earlier histories of the word (“queer the pitch”).
When animacy hierarchies are implicated, as they inevitably are, we

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can say that an everyday biopolitics takes place, a biopolitics that per-
petually resituates, recombines, and rearticulates the matter of life—
and potentially its very own ecologies—in the particularized bodies
of its animals, objects, humans. Even further, queer’s biopolitics, the
biopolitics of queerness, are (re-­)animated in its every use: In their
anthology Queering the Non/Human, published in 2008, Noreen Giff-
ney and Myra Hird temptingly note without elaborating that the en-
counter of “human” with “posthuman” is facilitated partly by the fact
that the term queer appears in the anthology “variously as a noun, ad-
jective, verb and adverb.”63 Considering that the noun status of queer
remains in flux, their comment can be expanded to mean that queer’s
profusion into various parts of speech, combined with its uncertain
nouniness, sets its users up for a suitably messy governance, even an
antigovernance.
I want to end by insisting on queer beyond its affectively neutral-
ized—neutered—senses. What are the possibilities of rejoinder, or re-
vitalization, for this contested term if it still has the capacity to galva-
nize but also to damage? And who or what is given the power to do
such a speaking-­back-­to? A person who is considered a nonsubject, a
subject who is abject, a person who does not communicate norma-
tively, an animal who doesn’t humanly speak, indeed perhaps even a
couch might not respond in expected terms. While the next chap-
ter’s task is to focus on the racialized complexities of nonhuman ani-
mal representation and its intersectional relation to queer and gender
theory dialogues, I do not attempt to address questions of response,
interactivity, and affective negotiation until the final chapter, where
the possibility of interanimate engagement with inanimate objects is
again broached.
This chapter examined how the term queer moves linguistically
through and beyond the concept of animacy, and how its coercive
grammatical inheritances are leveraged and manipulated in reactive
and regenerative forms of linguistic governance. It was intended to
provide a concrete, figural example of the kinds of animacy that lan-
guage both puts and fails to put into motion, while retaining lan-
guage’s precise relevance for concerns of governmentality. These con-
cerns, I argue, are sensitive to the complex gradations of animacy. The
next chapter also begins with language, as it considers, in turn, the ex-
clusion of nonhuman animals from (human) language and a racialized
counterexample by the language theorist J. L. Austin in his theorizing
of the linguistic performative.

85
Part II * Animals
 3
Queer Animality

What happens when animals appear on human landscapes? In spite

of their regular co-­occurrence with humans, nonhuman animals are
typologically situated elsewhere from humans, as in the linguistic con-
cept of an animacy hierarchy, a scale of relative sentience that places
humans at the very top. This presumed superiority of humans is itself
duratively supported and legitimated by “modern” states in a trans-
national system of (agricultural) capital. Yet to consider the biopoliti-
cal ramifications wrought by these separated categories is extremely
complex, since “humans” are not all treated one way and “animals”
are not uniformly treated another way. This is why the statement that
someone “treated me like a dog” is one of liberal humanism’s fictions:
some dogs are treated quite well, and many humans suffer in condi-
tions of profound indignity.1
Considering animacy hierarchies as ecologies (with interrelations
between types), and also as ontological propositions (with divisions
between types), this chapter asks in what ways they are regularly,
sometimes unwittingly, forsworn, disregarded, or overstepped by
their very users. I choose “ecology” here to suggest an imagined sys-
tem, not an actual, self-­regulating one. What ecologies do such sepa-
rations between human and animal rely upon and potentially trans-
form? This chapter considers in particular how animality, the “stuff ”
of animal nature that sometimes sticks to animals, sometimes bleeds
back onto textures of humanness. This fibrillation and indeterminacy
 Chapter Three

is perhaps not surprising, given the radicality of the founding segre-

gation. I suggest that thinking critically about animality has important
consequences for queered and racialized notions of animacy; for it is
animality that has been treated as a primary mediator, or crux (though
not the only one), for the definition of “human,” and, at the same mo-
ment, of “animal.”
This chapter takes a specific tack: first, attending to questions of
language, I ask after the politics of the exclusion of animals from
language and assess the legitimacy, scientific and otherwise, of the
stacked deck that it represents. Then I move to examine a signal mo-
ment within the work of language philosopher J. L. Austin from the
viewpoint of racialized animality. While the passage by Austin is fre-
quently glossed in queer scholarship, Austin’s peculiar constellation
of race, animality, and sexuality is here explored in depth. Following
this, I look at historical visual culture that triangulates these terms,
including a foundational text of Asian American studies, the fictional
character of Fu Manchu, to rediscover and stage Fu’s animality. In a
coda, I look at a recent, somewhat spectacularized example, the story
of a chimp named Travis, in order to pose questions about current,
possibly queer, kinship formations between animals and humans and
what they reveal of the unsteadiness of categorical hierarchies and the
legitimacy afforded to some of their leakages. Throughout, I recon-
sider the persistent ways in which animals are overdetermined within
human imaginaries.

Animal Language
Given the segregating terms of linguistic animacy, it is important to
understand how the sentience of animals is assessed, especially with
regard to its primary criteria: language and methods of communica-
tion. For instance, Derrida’s famous essay “And Say the Animal Re-
sponded?” explores the possibility of nonhuman-­animal “response” as
distinguished from “reaction” by hermeneutically approaching the gap
between the two; he levels a critique at the very use of language as a
loaded criterion of division between humans and animals, offering the
nonsingular, and animating, animot in animal’s stead. If he notes ani-
mals’ exclusion from language within humanist traditions, he never-
theless does not explore the possibility of animals’ own languages.2
Akira Mizuta Lippit’s work on animal figurations, too, expressly ex-

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cludes animals from language, without attempting to think what lan-

guage is or could be: “Animals are linked to humanity through mythic,
fabulous, allegorical, and symbolic associations, but not through the
shared possession of language as such. Without language one cannot
participate in the world of human beings.”3 Neither of these writers
is concerned, however, with the findings of linguistic research about
animal communication, which finds ample intelligent language use
in many species, not all of which are understood as taxonomically or
intellectually proximate to humans.
Language’s status among creatures, human and not human, con-
tinues to be hotly debated among humans, for as a register of intelli-
gence, judgment, and subjectivity it is a key criterion by which lay,
religious, and expertly scientific humans afford subjectivity—and
sentience—to animate beings both within and beyond the human
border. Who and what are considered to possess “language,” and the
qualities afforded to it within that location, are factors that influence
how identification, kinship, codes of morality, and rights are articu-
lated, and how affection and rights themselves are distributed; and
hence how ranges of human-­nonhuman discourses such as disability,
racialized kinship, industrial agriculture, pet ownership, and “nature”
itself are arbitrated.
Language is arguably a major criterion (or even the defining at-
tribute) that separates humans from animals, even among theorists
who decry the fact of the segregation. Aristotle’s notion that language
critically separated humans from animals becomes an evident legacy
in Martin Heidegger’s postulation: “Where there is no language, as
in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness
either of that which is not and of the empty.”4 While all kinds of “be-
havior” (the primordial stuff of psychology, a particularly powerful
humanist-­scientific discourse in Western history) are richly elaborated
(for instance, the marvelous capacities of various animate beings, in-
cluding mammals and invertebrates, many of which seem to far out-
shine human capacity), it is language’s degree of elaboration that seems
to spike prominently and uniquely for humans. Of course, this is to
the advantage of humans: the linguistic criteria are established promi-
nently and immutably in humans’ terms, establishing human preemi-
nence before the debates about the linguistic placement of humans’
animal subordinates even begin. Yet the exclusion of animals from
the realm of language is, historically, a relatively recent and uneven

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phenomenon; as Giorgio Agamben comments, “Up until the eigh-

teenth century, language—which would become man’s identifying
characteristic par excellence—jumps across orders and classes, for it
is suspected that even birds can talk.”5 Agamben considers how the
consolidation of the category Homo sapiens, as created through Lin-
naeus and his taxonomies, “is neither a clearly defined species nor a
substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recogni-
tion of the human.”6
Cary Wolfe describes the consequences of the liberal philosophi-
cal tradition’s “self-­serving abstraction of the subject of freedom” for
animal-­human ontologies, writing, “while the category of the subject
was formally empty in the liberal tradition, it remained materially full
of asymmetries and inequalities in the social sphere, so that theorizing
the subject as ‘nothing in particular’ could easily look like just another
sign of the very privilege and mobility enjoyed by those who were
quite locatable indeed on the social ladder—namely, at the top.”7 This
move follows earlier critiques of the ways that the abstracted subjects
of liberalism simply installed, rather than removed, unmarked privi-
leges among white, male humans in terms of gender and race.
One central task, I believe, is to be careful about conflating human
ideas about an animal with the actual animal itself, a caution some-
what distinct from Derrida’s concern that we are crafting a univer-
sal category of “the animal” by our use of the very word. This is a
hard habit to break, given the species burden that an individual ani-
mal bears in the view of humans and the conflation of referent, even
for us theorists, with actuality (which of course often leads to actual
changes to that effect or in that direction). Simultaneously, we should
not use the “actual” animal reflexively as a necessary ontological or
epistemological pressure back onto human understanding, but should
hold the two (or three or four) in a productive, self-­aware epistemo-
logical ­tension.
As my investment in language within this book is primarily con-
cerned with its material economies, I am less interested in tangling
too extensively here with the precise question of “animal language” in
terms of either the possibility of an epistemological meeting-­ground
or a philosophical disarticulation of the upper end of the animacy
hierarchy; others have admirably waded through the complexities of
this domain. Yet I am also reluctant to abandon the possibility of alter-
native foci of investigation (aside from language) into questions of

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what nonhuman and human animals are and what they share, since, as
we know, difference does not collapse even when we wish it away.
To the extent that resolving the question of an epistemological
meeting-­ground could relieve some of the condescension that the
profusion of human domains of research on and writing about ani-
mals (in terms that are clearly not theirs) would seem to enact, I sug-
gest that, separately from questions of language, we be prepared to ask
not only whether nonhuman animals might also possess something
like a “hierarchy of animacy,” but even more deeply, to ask after a reg-
ister of sentience, broadly construed. The scientific study of percep-
tion certainly suggests the beginnings of some intimation of this “reg-
istry of sentience,” whereby, on the one hand, the distinction between
perception and cognition is being methodically worn down (see, for
instance, the work of Louise Barrett)8 and, on the other hand, there
is the awareness that motion perception is very similar among non-
human animals and human animals, including the presence of mirror
neurons in great apes. Maxine Sheets-­Johnstone’s The Primacy of Move-
ment extends animacy perception to all animate beings, arguing that
movement is central to this understanding of animacy; she further
makes the case that mind-­body segregations continue to distortionary
levels among cognitive scientists and neuroscientists.9
Thinking—and feeling—through sentience promises a revising of
dominant animacy hierarchies, through its allowance of a broad range
of interanimation and uncognized recognition. But sentience is also
not without its problems, particularly if it is either restricted to what
could be discoverable (and falsifiable) through experimental research
or conceived in terms of the presence of pain and pleasure (the foun-
dation for claims within animal rights). I return to these questions
of sentience, subjectivity and objectivity, and transcorporeality at the
end of the book.

Austin’s Marriage, Revisited

Let us consider the animality of one originary moment in what is
called “theory.” Recently, a number of works have studied and cri-
tiqued the deployment of animal figures in theoretical argumentation.
Indeed, theory itself has deployed the raced animal figure perhaps
more than has been noticed, in this case precisely in a domain that at-
tempts to struggle with questions of language as it “materializes”: that

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 Chapter Three

is, within and through notions of the performative. In 1955, the British
language philosopher J. L. Austin put forward a theory of language
and action in a book called How to Do Things with Words, consisting of a
series of transcribed and edited lectures.10 As the lectures progressed,
Austin developed the concept of the performative, from a simple class
of utterances characterized by special main verbs in finite form, to a
more complex tripartite typology of acts that involve not merely the
special verbs but all utterances: locutionary (speech) content, illocu-
tionary (conventional) content, and perlocutionary (effective) con-
tent. In an early lecture, Austin was working off the simple definition
of the performative, one he would later break down, such as in the
example “I thee wed” in a marriage ceremony.
Stating that a performative could not succeed without supporting
conditions, Austin wrote, “Suppose we try first to state schematically
. . . some at least of the things which are necessary for the smooth or
‘happy’ functioning of a performative (or at least of a highly devel-
oped explicit performative).”11 He went on to list a number of ordered
features, among them “a1. There must exist an accepted conventional
procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to in-
clude the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain cir-
cumstances, and further, a2. the particular persons and circumstances
in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular
procedure invoked.”12
Austin’s model was also premised on the assumption that commu-
nication is “normally” goodwilled and relies on the proper position-
ing of that person delivering the performative. He wrote, “One might
. . . say that, where there is not even a pretence of capacity or a colour-
able claim to it, then there is no accepted conventional procedure; it
is a mockery, like a marriage with a monkey”13 (my emphasis). Proper ca-
pacity and goodwill were critical to the success of Austin’s performa-
tive, and these conditions remained, if somewhat sublimated, through
developments of the language scheme. In the moment of defining a
critical aspect of the successful performative, Austin turned to mar-
riage; at other key moments in the text, marriage again emerged as
a central exemplar. Eve Sedgwick has discussed this pattern’s appear-
ance in a flood of examples that curiously themselves tend to fail as
performatives, either as counterexamples (how not to do) or simply
as examples, which cannot therefore function as executing marriage.14
Sedgwick does not, however, note that one of the dramatic flourishes

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Austin recruits to seal the illegitimacy of an unauthorized marriage is

the figure of a monkey. In addition, it is interesting that if a claim to
capacity must exist, then it must have a kind of substance: it must be,
in Austin’s words, colourable. I read this as a suggestive provocation re-
garding “color” as an intensifier, one that is imbricated with questions
of legitimacy and the force of the law under which utterances are en-
acted.
What does Austin’s marriage with a monkey suggest, and on what
does it rely to make any kind of sense? While Austin’s articulation
of “mockery, like a marriage with a monkey,” seems mundane in the
sense that monkey invocations often function as normative dismissals,
we can look more closely at the significance of its collocations. More
specifically, we can consider what a queer reading might offer: “A
mockery, like a marriage with a monkey” equates a particular kind of
animal with the performative’s excess (and, perhaps, an affective ex-
cess inappropriate to the encounter), that which must be sloughed off
for the performative to work efficiently and effectively.
But what of the monkey? Here the “monkey” stands in for some-
thing: a creature with limited, superficial identifiability, grammati-
cally determined only by the indefinite article a; simile’s backgrounded
comparator (showing it to be even further expelled); a presumably
language-­less, cognitively reduced beast; and finally, the example
which serves as an example precisely because it is self-­evidently ex-
treme. As existing scholarship tells us from many different disci-
plinary sites and, indeed, as everyday language practices also confirm,
vivid links, whether live or long-­standing, continue to be drawn be-
tween immigrants, people of color, laborers and working-class sub-
jects, colonial subjects, women, queer subjects, disabled people, and
animals, meaning, not the class of creatures that includes humans but
quite the converse, the class against which the (often rational) human
with inviolate and full subjectivity is defined.15 This latter character-
ization exposes why animals have been so useful as figures, since they
stand in for the intermediary zone between human and nonhuman
status, and for the field of debate about the appropriateness of humane
and inhumane treatment.
Shoshana Felman marks the monkey example as a “monstrous mar-
riage” (the other, also in the text, being “bigamy”) and evidence of
the “black humor” of Austin’s text, remarking on the function of the
“triviality of the witty example.”16 While the example is surely witty,

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and while it might be said to evoke parallel planes of serious theory

on the one hand and humor on the other, I wonder what kind of humor
this provokes for its readers: is it really, or always, pleasurable, particu-
larly if we critically examine the value of that monkey?
Marking this phrase as trivial humor is certain to foreclose an ex-
amination of its precise bite and of the quirky ontological logic of
negative mattering, a mattering that, ultimately, matters. Felman con-
siders the “witty example,” which is in her view common for Austin,
as distinct from the business of substantiation or of theory, claiming
that it belongs to another stage entirely, one that is constructed as hu-
morous and hence rubs up against the straight-­faced realm of theory.
But Austin’s text should also be assessed against its own genre: that of
ordinary language philosophy, which structured itself broadly around
pointedly simple (silly?) examples. For instance, John Weightman’s
book on “language and the absurd” considers as its signature, titular
case the ever-­unraveling phrase “the cat sat on the mat.”17 As Der-
rida pointed out in his essay “Signature Event Context,” “one will no
longer be able to exclude, as Austin wishes, the ‘non-­serious’ . . . from
‘ordinary’ language.”18 It becomes more difficult to determine what is
trivial and what is not.
Read “seriously” enough to assess its textual value as simultaneously
nontrivial, Austin’s structural dismissal of the animal monkey and his
matter-­of-­fact exclusion of the monkey from the institution of mar-
riage together consign the marrying monkey to queer life.19 I would
assert that, in citing a particular kind of marriage just as he asserts
its invalidity, however humorously, Austin is responding to a sensed
threat. Someone’s heteronormative and righteous marriage must be
protected against the mockeries of marriage; and we might imagine
that someone’s righteous and heteronormative speech must be pro-
tected against the mockery of performative improprieties, which for
all practical purposes are open to convenient definition. Arguably,
then, it is not just marrying monkeys, but those who occupy proxi-
mal category membership, that is, those who approximate marrying
monkeys, who are consigned to queer life.
What might have most registered as a threat or worthy of exclusion?
Austin wrote these lectures in Britain in the mid-­1950s, a period of in-
tensive societal and legal flux in which both heterosexuality and racial
purity were being actively shored up. In the 1950s, British police com-
menced a widely publicized purge of homosexuals, leading to the ar-

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rests of many high-­profile men who were convicted of “deviant” be-

havior. Parallel to the Cold War “lavender scare” in the United States,
the British Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell-­Fyfe promised to rid
England of the “plague” of homosexuality, a promise he made good
on by prosecuting hundreds of men.20
Austin was also writing at a time in which immigrants from for-
mally decolonized sites were arriving in greater numbers, as Britain
went through the intensified strains of postcolonial revision.21 The
year 1948 saw the first group of West Indian immigrants enter Brit-
ain from sites in the Commonwealth, having been granted citizen-
ship through the British Nationality Act. Violence and discrimina-
tion against the immigrants grew in the 1950s, resulting in restrictive
Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 (the year of publication of
How to Do Things with Words).
Austin’s monkey need not be innocent of this more generalized
context. Already circulating was a long history of British and Euro-
pean associations of apes and monkeys with African subjects, fed and
conditioned by the imperialist culture of colonial relations. These
were underlain by an abiding evolutionary mapping which tempo-
rally projected non-­European peoples and nonwhite racialized groups
onto earlier stages of human evolution; this is part and parcel of what
Nicole Shukin has called “the productive ambivalence of the colonial
stereotype and the animal sign.”22
The powerfully racialized undertones of “mockery” have been
theorized by thinkers such as Homi Bhabha, who opens his essay “Of
Mimicry and Man: On the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” with
a citation from Sir Edward Cust’s “Reflections on West African Affairs
. . . Addressed to the Colonial Office” (Hatchard, London, 1839): “To
give the colony the forms of independence is a mockery.”23 Thus, we
might say that a racial—as well as freakishly gendered—body haunts
Austin’s monkey, just as British whiteness may haunt Austin’s autho-
rized speaker. Once again, a colonial past might lurk inside a presum-
ably “innocent” cultural form that seems to deploy a presentist—or
timeless—animal figure. Austin was working in a specific social and
political context, and to tease out the undertones of his language is
also to explore the contemporary hauntings or habits of epistemo-
logical projection with regard to animality, sex, and race. We might
also use this example to understand some linguistic animal figures as
racialized and sexualized before the fact, especially if used in contexts

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where race has a history of social or cultural presence. The “monkey”

is a powerfully loaded trope, but not always (or necessarily) negative;
in his study of black vernacular language in African American literary
works, Henry Louis Gates Jr. discusses how the “Signifying Monkey”
is also, within African American culture, a critical trickster figure that
self-­reflexively speaks back to language.24 Other monkey figures, such
as the Hindu Hanuman and the Chinese mythical Monkey King, have
culturally valued trickster ways.
Still, so many apparently innocuous conjurings of animal-­human
relating—as in the absurd mockery of marriage to a monkey—are
underlain or counterpointed by far-­from-­innocent global histories
whose legacies continue through animal-­human mappings. For this,
we can credit not only early classificatory divisions of Greek philoso-
phers that included congruences between animals and slaves and be-
tween animals (nature) and women, but more-­recent centuries of
shifting borders to facilitate colonial animalization.
But how are each of these categories—animality, sexuality, race,
ability—stationed in regard to one another? Again, animality cannot
but mediate and interrupt simplistic analogies, even those in which it
is involved. This present alteration in itself might properly be dubbed
queer, in light of queer’s own mutative animacy. In other words, within
terms of animacy hierarchies, might we have a way to think about queer
animality as a genre of queer animacy, as a modulation of life force? It is
my contention that animacy can itself be queer, for animacy can work to
blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-­animal-­vegetable-­mineral with
which it is associated. Recentering on animality (or the animals who
face humans) tugs at the ontological cohesion of “the human,” stretch-
ing it out and revealing the contingent striations in its springy taffy: it
is then that entities as variant as disability, womanhood, sexuality, emo-
tion, the vegetal, and the inanimate become more salient, more pal-
pable as having been rendered proximate to the human, though they
have always subtended the human by propping it up.

Animal Theories
Austin was not alone in his recourse to the animal as a metaphoric
crux within theories of language and the law. Animals bear the bur-
den of symbolic weight, not least within contemporary cultural criti-
cism. At levels linguistic and gestural, political and theatrical, ritual

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and scientific, representations abound that implicitly or explicitly in-

voke animals and humans in complex relations. Animal studies is a
multidisciplinary field, reaching across environmental studies, science
and technology studies, psychoanalysis, ecocriticism, and literary and
cultural studies. This growing field of makes clear the profound inter-
constitution of animal and human identities. At the same time, “the
animal” stands in to melancholically symbolize what is being lost as a
consequence (“natural” or not) of human dominance over the earth
it occupies. Certainly, animal representations can remain symboli-
cally tied to human anxieties about the extinct status of their real-­life
counterparts, as Ursula Heise found true of the fictional animals (re-
generated dinosaurs, virtual animals, and electronic animals) in several
works from the late twentieth century.25 Made “freakish” by the tech-
nological innovations required to make them, they are often spectacu-
larized as modern-­day lusus naturae,26 or, in the case of Heise’s analy-
sis of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, fetishized and commodified
as pets.
Perhaps because it has served for the human as such a rich com-
parative repository—because it is kept significatorily empty—there
is play in the animal: what the animal means, what it does, what kind
of sex it has, what it wants. Such play yields a vast range of imag-
istic, affective, and economic projections, from images of bourgeois
leisure in the park, to formal calculations of agricultural labor on the
farm, to military might in the form of cultivated horses. At the same
time, symbologies of freely romping or well-­trained and valued ani-
mals are shadowed by the converse. They are also sources of refer-
ence for frighteningly indefinable or disallowable sexual practices
(such as “beastly” rape or unctuous, multilimbed octopus sex), and
they are the registers of the very disposability of life, where animal
status yields death, such as when war legitimates dehumanizations or
animalizations of state enemies. In Christian traditions, animals are
further vested (or weighted) with a frolicking, prelapsarian innocence
of Creation. What would it mean to take this variance of animal play
seriously by exploring the ways in which racialities, animalities, and
sexualities interplay, and are affectively rich, delightful, illusory, toxic,
abject, innocent, dark, light, natural, and artificial?
This attraction-­repulsion is not unprecedented. The human en-
gagement with both nonanimals and with “technologies” predates
by millennia such interabsorption of categories; consider Aristotle’s

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discussion of slavery, which states that “there is little or no differ-

ence between the uses of domestic animals and slaves.”27 Indeed, it is
not actually clear how we might diagnose this collapsing of animal,
human, and machine as unique in terms of some greater speed or in-
tensity of conceptual conflation. Rather, stubborn axes of human dif-
ference are imposed on the bodies of animals, and those of animal
difference are thrust onto the bodies of humans, differences which
repeat and repeat, calling on any narrative of utopian merging to ac-
count for itself.
When many axes of human difference collide, the stakes heighten;
if the animal figure mediates many of these axes, then it becomes a
condensed and explosive discursive site. These crises of humanity-­
with-­animality are concerned with borders and attractions. And it is
in fact not surprising that “even” in an era of biotechnology, racisms
attain, for this would be to suggest that “innovation,” at the leading
edge of futurity, is also at the height of sociopolitical advancement. As
Sarah Franklin has suggested in her book Dolly Mixtures, such charged
drives toward unindictable advancement do not go unaccompanied
by their affective underside: there are simultaneous concerns about
biotechnology conditioned and fed precisely by the fear of what is yet
to be known.28
Over and again, the animal, cited specifically as “animal” (in cate-
gorial contrast to “human”), thus survives in representation. Animals
rematerialize here and there as multilingual, interdisciplinary beings,
sometimes just themselves, sometimes vitalizing fictive monsters,
facing humans. Other zones of encounter include zoos and exotic or
domesticated pet ownership, each site with its own discursive terms;
pets, for instance, bear the dizzying simultaneity of being named,
individualized, and “kinned” while remaining special and distinct
precisely for being nonhuman.29 In a way, animals serve as objects of
almost fetishistic recuperation, recruited as signifiers of “nature,” or
“the real,” and used to stand in for a sometimes conflicting array of
other cultural meanings (including fear, discipline, sexuality, purity,
wisdom, and so on).
This special status applied to the animal is part of the “new econ-
omy of being” of modernity; as Lippit notes, “It is a cliché of moder-
nity: human advancement always coincides with a recession of nature
and its figures—wildlife, wilderness, human nature.”30 Lippit claims
that animals constitute a third term, an “essential epistemological

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category” (mediating between scientific thought on the one hand

and artistic representation on the other). However, in an interview,
Donna Haraway voices frustration with the humanism subtending
the singular conception of “the animal”: “[T]he animal is every bit as
much a humanist abstraction, a universal, an empty, a misplaced con-
creteness issue, but it’s worse than that. It’s stripped of all particularity
and reality and most of all, from my view, stripped of relationality.”31
Haraway here refers to the regular forfeiture of particular knowledge
about nonhuman animals, one that turns them into a “universal” ab-
straction and ignores the fact that the very category of “animal” might
be so overly generalized that it threatens to collapse. Knowing what
this category consists of with any particularity is made impossible not
only by recourse to a pancategory like animal, but also by humans’
ignorance, which scoops all that is nonhuman and animate into one
fold (unless one is in a position to cultivate more specialized under-
standing, such as veterinary or breed-­specific knowledge).
Haraway reminds us, too, that actual animals often bear little if any
resemblance to the signifiers and discourses used to reference them.
Though the difference between symbolic and actual is easily observed,
the quality of this difference between a symbolic and actual animal is
important. Critics of animal studies might interject that one fault of
animal representation is that it appears to ignore the “real” lives of ani-
mals. Such a conflation takes too easily as given the indelible link be-
tween an animal signifier and its referents, as well as the purity of the
natural “real.” Because animal signifiers are so deeply bound up with
human cultural, political, and social meaning, one can never assume
these are one and the same. Rather, the connection they share is that
of reference, a relation that is sometimes invoked, but all too often not.
Haraway diagnoses the extraordinary significatory powers given to
an entity called “the animal” as characterized by “misplaced concrete-
ness.”
Amid the fluctuations of animals’ lives, “the animal” as animal sus-
tains, while humans project the vexed peculiarities that are the conse-
quences of interested humans’ psychic fibrillations onto the specters
and accomplices of animal representations. Certain kinds of animality
are racialized not through nature’s or modernity’s melancholy but
through another temporalized map: that of pseudo-­Darwinian evo-
lutionary discourses tied to colonialist strategy and pedagogy that
superimposed phylogenetic maps onto synchronic human racial ty-

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pologies, yielding simplistic promulgating equations of “primitive”

peoples with prehuman stages of evolution. It is this discursive tem-
plate that informs the contemporary discourse “on Africa,” which, as
Achille Mbembe writes in On the Postcolony,
is almost always deployed in the framework (or in the fringes) of a
meta-­text about the animal—to be exact, about the beast: its experi-
ence, its world, and its spectacle. In this meta-­text, the life of Afri-
cans unfolds under two signs. First is the sign of the strange and the
monstrous. . . . [T]he other sign, in the discourse of our times, under
which African life is interpreted is that of intimacy. It is assumed
that, although the African has a self-­referring structure that makes
him or her close to being “human,” he or she belongs, up to a point,
to a world we cannot penetrate. At bottom, he/she is familiar to us.
We can give an account of him/her in the same way we can under-
stand the psychic life of the beast. We can even, through a process of
domestication and training, bring the African to where she or he can
enjoy a fully human life.32
Such a discursive mapping has had the effect of both temporalizing
race and relegating the fields of barbarism, animality, and primitivism
to yet another past, quite beyond the recession of animals under the
sign of modernity. I am interested in exploring the means by which
animal figures, in their epistemological duties as “third terms,” fre-
quently also serve as zones of attraction for racial, sexual, or abled
otherness, often simultaneously. Mining sometimes disparate cultural
works for these collocations reveals the more complex psychic invest-
ments of a whiteness triple-­dipped in heteronormativity, ableism, and
speciesism and tells of the precise quality of the animacies in which it
is invested.

Animacy Theory
While it would be false to equate the two, relations between the two
epistemological regions of queer and animal abound. The animal has
long been an analogical source of understanding for human sexu-
ality: since the beginning of European and American sexology in the
nineteenth century, during which scientific forays into sexuality were
made, homosexuality has served both as a limit case for establishing
the scientific zone of the sexual “normal”33 and, more recently, as a

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positive validation for “naturalness” (in which what nature maps is

fail-­safe to the nonhuman animal, as opposed to the messy interven-
tions of culture in the human animal).34 Such coincidences are by no
means a tale of the past. A durable Enlightenment calculus, uplifting
rationality and retaining its gendering as masculine, solidified the be-
lieved proximity or belonging of women to nature, and in some cases
additionally imputed women’s categorial attraction to animality. Such
partnerings are intensified or provoked by marks of race and class,
albeit unpredictably.
One key early scholar of queer animal studies, Jennifer Terry, has ex-
amined ways in which “animals provide models for scientists seeking
a biological substrate of sexual orientation”;35 in addition, the popu-
lar equation of sexuality as evidence of one’s animality or “animal na-
ture” is oddly inverted. Under certain circumstances, the animal itself
becomes sexuality, to the extent that the biological material of non-
human animals (including but not limited to dna) is used in human-­
directed reproductive research such as stem cell technology and that
animal by-­products and hormones are used to increase human sex
drives.36 Likewise, consumer-­driven campaigns link young children’s
premature puberty with hormones in the cow’s milk and chicken that
they consume (concerns that are often racialized, as in the widely pub-
licized case of the “epidemic” of accelerated sexual development in
Puerto Rico).37 In such “new natures,” animals are not a third term;
instead, humans and nonhuman animals recombine sexually within
the same ontological fold in which they are sometimes admitted to
belong.
While earlier works have understood scientific investments in terms
of “homosexuality,” more recent threads of scholarship have mapped
the lessons of a more wide-­ranging queer theory to the region of me-
diation between human and nonhuman animal. Thus, the sometimes
resolutely materialized “animal” and the sometimes resolutely imma-
terial “queer” make for an intriguing conversation, one that may not
promise resolution. The feat of animal-­human connections has much
to do with such ontologizing work.
There currently exists a range of work about queer animals, sexu-
alized human animality, and animal racialization, although there re-
mains some hesitation for some scholars to flesh out race or sex where
it also appears. For instance, in an excellent recent book containing
queer animal studies scholarship, Queering the Non/Human, one finds

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just a trace of work that deals substantively with the question of race.38
To consider that categories of sexuality are not colorblind—as queer
of color scholarship asserts—is to take intersectionality seriously, even
when work seems to go far afield into the realm of the animal. Given
the insistent racializations of animals, we can then study the tricky,
multivalent contours of a communalism that includes both human
animals and nonhuman animals, the border between which remains
today intense, politically charged, and of material consequence, and
run through and through with race, sometimes even in its most ex-
treme manifestations. It is therefore increasingly apt to explore the in-
sistent collisions of race, animality, sexuality, and ability, and to probe
the syntaxes of their transnational formations.
Categories of animality are not innocent of race, as is gestured to in
some queer of color scholarship; both David Eng and Siobhan Somer-
ville study early psychoanalysis and early sexology’s reliance on racial
difference while also noting their interest in tying ontogeny (indi-
vidual development) to phylogeny (evolutionary history), thereby
loosely mapping animality to early developmental stages.39 Still, “the
animal” figure here is at best a haunting overlay. In my attempt to
bridge the methodological and epistemological gaps among queer of
color scholarship, linguistics, ethnic studies, and white queer studies,
I propose an optic—or, rather, a sensibility—that seeks to make con-
sistently available the animalities that live together with race and
with queerness, the animalities that we might say have crawled into
the woodwork and await recognition, and, concurrently, the racial-
ized animalities already here. What, for instance, of the queerness of
some human racialized animalities? What of the animality residing in
human racialized queerness?
To extend my argument from the previous chapter, I do not imagine
queer or queerness to merely indicate embodied sexual contact among
subjects identified as gay and lesbian, as occurs via naive translations
of queer as the simple chronological continuation or epistemological
condensation of a gay and lesbian identitarian project. Rather, I think
more in terms of the social and cultural formations of “improper af-
filiation,” so that queerness might well describe an array of subjectivi-
ties, intimacies, beings, and spaces located outside of the heteronor-
mative. Similarly, I consider animality not a matter of the creatures that
we “know” to be nonhuman (for instance, the accepted logics of pets
or agricultural livestock and our stewardship of them), so much as a

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flexible rubric that collides with and undoes any rigid understanding
of animacy. This is a paradoxical space about which we both claim to
know much and yet very little, that resists unbinding from its human-
ist formulation and from its strange admixture between science and
racist imperialism.
Recently, some mainstream posthumanist subcultures have not only
engaged machinic intimacies or affections but also embraced queer or
trans animal affinities that are based in targeted, and somewhat par-
tial, slides down the animacy hierarchy. These are found, for instance,
in furries cultures, or “furry fandom.” The sexual subcultures of “fur-
ries” (those who are turned on by dressing as animals or having sex
with someone dressed as an animal) and “plushies” (those with erotic
attachments to stuffed animals) are combinations of objecthood and
animality that work despite patently false or even cartoon-­styled cos-
tumes. These furry subcultures can be charted on a shared path with
some bdsm subcultures insofar as both can engage in enriched ani-
mal figuration—what performance studies scholar Marla Carlson
calls “theatrical animality”—without generally pursuing perfect ani-
mal representation or embodiment.40 Yet, just as bdsm practices can
deploy accoutrements of animalness—dog chains, dog bowls—to en-
gage in elaborated relations of power, the hybrid creatures that furries
represent seem to cultivate a sensualized sense of animacy embedded
within animality that the costumes partially enable. The utopian rela-
tionality that furriness seems to represent is put into relief by Carlson’s
sad conclusion to her personal account of Stalking Cat, a biohuman
who has undergone multiple surgeries to felinize himself over many
years. Despite finding the promise of community among furries, there
were limits to the possibility of multiple cohabitation: as Carlson care-
fully writes, “because expenses and dynamics became unworkable for
this interesting household, Cat was asked to move out later that sum-
mer,” reminding me of the ambition, the economics, the friction, and
the intensity that so often occurs within human-­identified queer sub-
cultural collective households.
Furries cultures are characterizable perhaps as having a “multi-
animalist” utopian vision (“multianimalist” here is meant to play on
“multiculturalist,” particularly in its peremptory claim to egalitar-
ian distributions of power). There appears to be nothing potentially
harmful or exploitive, for example, about saying, “I’m a fluffy rabbit
and I like carrots, want to do me?” The overwhelmingly cute, indeed

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aestheticized, vigor of this subculture—observable, for instance, in a

quick survey of the self-­nominations of furries—seems to come in
line with its seemingly predictable paths of recourse to animal be-
coming. The popular furries figures are much more based on rabbits,
cats, and dogs than on, say, lizards, eagles, and centipedes. As Deleuze
and Guattari ask, “Are there Oedipal animals with which one can ‘play
Oedipus,’ play family, my little dog, my little cat, and then other ani-
mals that by contrast draw us into an irresistible becoming?”41 Further-
more, the animalized racialities that inevitably intervene into such
subcultures (that, for instance, accompany “evil” animals and “good”
animals, that is, the innocent whiteness of bunnies) seem to go uncri-
tiqued.
I wish to assert that limiting ourselves to reworking the philoso-
phies of animal-­human dependencies, or the ethological studies of a
particular animal, or this or that human-­animal relationship, carries
certain risks: namely, the importing of historical racializations and
queerings (or, indeed, imperial tropes) that subtend the very humans
and animals under discussion, despite all the bracketing we may be
cautioned to do of Aristotle’s reasoning about slavery on the basis of
animality, the Westernism of Derrida’s animal thinking, and so on.
These frequently participate in a larger ecology called an animacy
hierarchy; and the animal position within this hierarchy is difficult or
impossible to fix. The animal figures—whether fictional or actual—
that appear are themselves animate, mobile. The hierarchy slips not
only because it iteratively renews itself; I suggest its slippage subtends
its very fixture, and it calls for us to detect the ways it does so. I use
this moment to call for, not animal theory, but animacy theory.

Sights of Queer Animality

Up to this point, I have largely been theorizing animacy in terms of
language. But I am equally interested in other domains in which ani-
macy might figure. In this section, I turn to historical visual cultures,
offering animacy theory as an optic to apprehend them, an optic that
applies as much to visualities as to language. Animacy theory is a fer-
tile means of apprehending such slippery figures as a mobile simian
figuration and an animalized human character, particularly, I suggest,
in the context of the history of race relations in the United States. I
look to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century not only be-
cause it was a consequential period in race and labor formations in the

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United States, one that consolidated normal and abnormal identity,

U.S. expansionism, and Western colonialist tropes, but also because
conjoined figurations of animality, race, and queerness were not mere
sublimated suggestions, but rather were explicitly rendered, drawn,
and illustrated.
By revisiting the turn of the twentieth century, I reveal that ani-
mality played a visibly mediating conceptual role within the unstable
landscape of racialization. Indeed, animalized intimacies were de-
picted in visual culture that included popular and widely circulated
materials such as advertisements and political cartoons. Attending to
a small handful of such images, I emphasize the importance of what
Claire Jean Kim calls “racial triangulation”42—particularly the intro-
duction of Asian race notions into a formerly bipolar racial imaginary
of black and white, with an understanding that who was considered
“white” was ideologically determined by class and nationality, such
that, for instance, Irish immigrants were excluded from its bound-
aries.43
The late nineteenth century in the United States witnessed sig-
nificant turmoil with regard to shifts in labor, race, and population;
when the economy took a downturn, concerns grew among whites
about adequate employment, fears that engendered a competitive and
scapegoating sense of “Yellow Peril” against the Chinese that emerged
in cultural expression as well as in law. This concern was made espe-
cially evident, as Lisa Lowe writes, in attitudes and policies around
Chinese immigration:
In a racially differentiated nation such as the United States, capital
and state imperatives may be contradictory: capital, with its sup-
posed needs for “abstract labor,” is said by Marx to be unconcerned
by the “origins” of its labor force, whereas the nation-­state, with its
need for “abstract citizens” formed by a unified culture to participate
in the political sphere, is precisely concerned to maintain a national
citizenry bound by race, language, and culture. In late-­nineteenth-­
century America, as the state sought to serve capital, this contradic-
tion between the economic and the political spheres was sublated
through the legal exclusion and disenfranchisement of Chinese im-
migrant laborers.44
Lowe notes that increased Asian immigration was facilitated by the
interest of the United States in drawing on cheap international sources
for labor, while the legal exclusions of Chinese workers were part of

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a wider strategy to create a racially stratified labor force. As Lowe

keenly observes, this had profoundly gendered consequences for later
cultural formations and subjectivities. The United States, which had
encouraged the use of cheap labor but was simultaneously beholden
to its white citizenry, enacted a sequence of laws that limited legal
citizenship for Chinese subjects, culminating in the Chinese Exclu-
sion Act of 1882. In this same period, the enfranchisement of black
men was legally enacted through the Fifteenth Amendment of 1869,
which raised the specter of undesired black citizenship; its enforce-
ment was sporadic and uneven between individual states.
The tensions engendered by these racial exclusions and enfranchise-
ments were registered in a variety of visual media. The cartoon in
figure 6 was published in The San Francisco Illustrated wasp in 1877. The
wasp was a magazine that rehearsed anti-­Chinese fears in an era of
continued Chinese immigration. In the image, we see an animated
and physical backlash against Chinese immigration—glossed here as
“the Chinese Question”—as a white laborer in California in uniform
leading the “Working Men’s Procession” punches a Chinese coolie in
the mouth while another coolie looks on. The Working Men’s Party
asserted that the Chinese immigrant laborers were threatening the
economic livelihood of whites.
Chinese hair was often referred to in the West as a tail. The British
diplomat, Sinologist, and translator Herbert Giles wrote in his book
The Civilization of China, published in 1911, that “a Chinese coolie will
tie his tail round his head when engaged on work.”45 Interestingly, the
Chinese man’s hands, a common signal of labor and work capacity,
are ambiguously absent or concealed by his long flopping sleeves that
make his arms dangle “apelike” and passively at his sides, against the
obviously active and well-­defined fist of the white bearer of the “first
blow.” With his “knock-­knees” and “pigeon-­toes” and a head improb-
ably straining to the left, the Chinese man is presented as an ungainly
figure who appears to float or flail next to the stout white man whose
legs are solidly planted on the ground. His peach fuzz—or facial fur—
contrasts with the thicker, virile beard of his attacker. (Interestingly,
beards themselves, as masculine secondary sexual characteristics, were
subject to monitoring and debate among whites in the nineteenth
century, shifting between “barbarous” and “civilized” masculinity.)
Ultimately, this Chinese representation has been graphically rendered
as animal-­like, as simianized.

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6. Unattributed illustration. The San Francisco Illustrated wasp 2, no. 71 (1877).
 Chapter Three

7. “Rough on Rats” advertisement, c. 1870–90.

Daniel K. E. Ching Collection, Chinese Historical
Society of America, San Francisco.

A contemporaneous advertisement by E. S. Wells Trade Company

for one of its products called “Rough on Rats” (another was “Rough
on Corns”) essentially promulgates the Chinese as rats (or of the same
stuff as rats), leaving a tempting empty slot where a banner might
otherwise bear their name: the location closest to where the direct
object of “it clears out” might be (figure 7).
The rat poison ad, whose explicit purpose is to sell poison, also takes
advantage of the wider anti-­Chinese discourses that themselves racial-
ized the notion of “hygiene.” It relies on a logic of similarity between
rats and Chinese people to stir up fears of infection, invoking not only
a similarity but a consanguinity (or even a substitution) between the
rat and the Chinese man. First, the two bodies merge through his act
of eating and by the superposition of a second rat against the man’s
pants. This merging is augmented by the analogical prompt of the
mirroring of the two tails (rat appendage and hair), which makes the
rat approaching the man’s mouth almost seem like an act of cannibal-
ism. “They Must Go” doubles in meaning, simultaneously referring to

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the undesired animal pests and literally citing the slogan of the anti-­
Chinese immigration movement. Another large rat, dead and flat on
its back at the top of the ad, indicates the triumph of the poison but
also hints at the animal’s passivity or submissiveness. We can consider
the man’s depicted ingestion of the rat a form of bizarre bodily inti-
macy, one that complements the kinds of human queer sexualities
that Nayan Shah meticulously charted in his history of turn-­of-­the-­
century San Francisco Chinatown.46 Shah (who makes glancing ref-
erence to rats) details how unruly human intimacies—in the homo-
sociality of bachelor households, the “improper intimacies” of opium
dens, and the shared parenting of Chinatown working women—­
participated together in white domestic discourses of racialized hy-
giene and public health.
But how and when were the Chinese Americans racialized in animal
terms in relation to others? Certainly, animalization was not the ex-
clusive province of the Chinese. Arguably, African slaves first bore the
epistemological weight of animalization, when they were rendered
as laboring beasts by slave owners and political theorists legitimizing
slavery. In 1879, just two years after the “rat tail” cartoon, the politi-
cal satirist and German émigré Thomas Nast mocked U.S. Senator
Blaine’s opposition to the modified Burlingame treaty reopening con-
nections with China, giving it favored-­nation trade status and allow-
ing greater immigration (figure 8). Here Nast points out that Blaine
opposed further Chinese immigration; on this issue, the cartoonist
sympathized with Chinese immigrants. Elsewhere, he was known to
animalize some “whites” in his illustrations in order to demonstrate
white barbarity in relation to Chinese “higher” civilization; these ani-
malized “white people” were Irish. The contested nature of the white-
ness of the Irish had a partial basis, notably, in Irish-­black proximities
in the formation of the American working class.
In this image, the figure to the left, appearing to represent a black
man holding a recently legalized voting card (black men’s right to
vote was legally established in 1865, but was only extended to South-
ern blacks in 1868), seems to be simianized, as indicated by his hunched
posture, diminished size, and relatively small head, complete with a
darkened skin tone. The small head also suggests a visual hinting at
microcephaly, indicating the close connection between disability,
“freakiness,” intelligence, race, and animality.47
It is tempting here to hypothesize a strange circulation of racialized

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8. Thomas Nast, “The Civilization of Blaine,” Harper’s Weekly, 1879.
 Queer Animality

figuration: Nast was known to study, and borrow from, British cari-
cature. He further shared (or had adopted) the British disdain for the
Irish, going on to not only simply ape-­ify the Irish representations
in his own pictorial repudiations, but arguably participating in what
Anne McClintock refers to as “the iconography of domestic degen-
eracy.” Referring to the “receding foreheads” in the representations of
the Irish in an illustration from Puck, McClintock writes that this ico-
nography “was widely used to mediate the manifold contradictions in
imperial hierarchy—not only with respect to the Irish but also to the
other ‘white negroes’—Jews, prostitutes, the working-­class, domestic
workers, and so on.”48 The representation of the black man here thus
speaks to a possible borrowing by Nast of degeneracy’s visual argu-
ments from Irishness and other European others, ironically reapplying
already hybridized iconographies of Africanized whiteness to newly
enfranchised African American men. The travel of such iconographies
reminds us that the travel of bodies, whether coerced or facilitated by
the state, is merely one strand to trace in imperialism’s diverse fabric,
which in some ways ignores the “postcolonial” births of nations.
The black man’s pose is especially striking in relation to the erect
poses of Blaine and the Chinese man, who stands in front of an array
of imported goods as if he is an ambassador of capitalism. Rather than
standing upright, the black man’s body curls over toward the senator;
his right leg is bent up as his foot crooks around his other knee, so
that his balance is unstable, dependent upon the Senator to whom he
clings. John Kuo Wei Tchen analyzes Nast’s cartoon:
Blaine reject[s] the teas, silks, porcelain, and carvings offered by John
Confucius [what I understand to be Nast’s stand-­in “good” Chinese
immigrant], thus trampling on the Burlingame Treaty, while cater-
ing to the ballot of a gross caricature of a black man who, though
physically full-­grown, is depicted in a childlike posture. Essentially
Nast was saying that treaties, trade, and superior Chinese culture
were not important to Blaine as long as he could gain the vote of
an imbecilic, uncultivated former slave. The drawing was satirically
captioned “The Civilization of Blaine,” with John Confucius asking,
“Am I not a man and a brother?”—the English abolitionists’ slogan.49
This depiction can be thought of as animating a multiracial drama. The
comparative use of the negative Black example to demonstrate an-
other’s secured or accomplished subjecthood is a vast and prevalent

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trope that unsurprisingly has come to inform some forms of Asian

antiblack racism, in another instance of the success of divide-­and-­
conquer strategies as a way to defuse coalitional antiracist movements.
I say multiracial, not multicultural, because such racial triangulations
ironize precisely the facile fantasies of multiculturalism’s prehistory in
the United States.50
Thus, I suggest that the simianization of this black man in the car-
toon was a convenient trope for Nast. The cartoon recruits the animacy
hierarchy to secure the very status of “the human” itself, since those
deemed uncivilized or less civilized may simultaneously be thought in
terms of primitivism, barbarism, and animality. One simianized figure
stands in for the threat to the citizenship of the next human candidate
(the Chinese man), who is not in this case simianized.
The simianizing present in “The Civilization of Blaine” neatly aligns
with the violence of the desire for the white laborer to expel the Chi-
nese. But things can become also more complex than this simian-­
other formation, and they may do so queerly. While Tchen remarks on
the “childlike posture” of the black man, he does not mention femi-
nization or, to be more precise, the intimate bodily contact between
the black man and Senator Blaine, with their hands, wrists, and feet
touching. But even more significantly: there is a curious intimacy be-
tween Blaine, the anti-­immigrant crusader, and the presumably black
voting subject nearly in Blaine’s arms, holding his vote, with legs in
a simpering curtsy and toes touching Blaine’s own. Might we begin
to think of this as a queer proximity, a queer intimacy? If we do, how
does Nast’s wish to depict Blaine’s catering to black political desire
become depicted as queer intimacy? And in what ways does it exceed
a typical cartoonist’s need to graphically represent strange alliances?
What are the implications of the presence of animality in this queer
desire? While Tchen has remarked on the animality and barbarity of
both Chinese and Irish figures in Nast’s images, he seems to allow the
black figure’s own animality to be spoken for by the genre of “gross
caricature,” thus attenuating any additional potencies of Nast’s visual
argument.51 The queerness also implicates and taints Blaine, as he is
chastised here for not listening to the tune of capital as represented
by the Chinese merchant and for being drawn into a circuit of bodily
intimacy with a black man who presumably stands outside such capi-
tal, rendering their relationship at once cross-­racial, ambivalently
cross-­species, and queer.

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 Queer Animality

As these three historical examples illuminate, animal figurations at

the turn of the century were by no means simple and were often over-
laid with sexual implications. It is commonly understood that ani-
mality “sticks” indelibly to specific races. However, thinking these
images within the rubric of what I am calling animacy theory, we can
see how that animality can shift, attaching itself to different kinds of
groups. That the domain of the animal is treated as a zone of deferral
means that animality subtends a great deal below the white human
man at the top, who in spite of his own superior position, can be
dragged down by his own queer association. Paying attention to the
relationality among the figures allows us to see the complex queer
intimacies involved.

Querying Fu Manchu
The conjunction of animality, Asianness, and queerness persisted be-
yond the late nineteenth century. I now turn to consider—but hope-
fully not beat—the “dead horse” of Fu Manchu, the outlandish, turn-­
of-­the-­century creation figured by tropes of the Yellow Peril. I do so
in part to provide some historical ballast to arguments about queer
animal presents, and simultaneously to point to the strength of legacy
and historical consequence in the shape and timing of Fu Manchu’s
appearances in the United States. Fu Manchu is in some ways (one
slice of ) the bread and butter of Asian American studies; he further
occupies the historically dominant focus of Asian American studies on
Chinese and East Asian figures. Yet, as a primary site of study, he de-
serves revisiting with the optic of animacy. “Fu Manchu” is a prewar
phenomenon in which cinema charted, embellished, and vitalized a
racialized animality beyond its literary mappings.
Fu Manchu appeared in a series of popular novels and mainstream
Hollywood films through the first half of the twentieth century. Of
course, Fu Manchu has lived well beyond the bounds of his British
and North American literary and filmic existence, leaking into fic-
tional representations of evil Asian masculinity, and acting as a key
figure of Asian American and scholarly analysis.52 In the 1960s, he took
new form in the Omaha Zoo as an orangutan, “Fu Manchu,” who be-
came famous for his skillful escapes: he was so wily, in fact, that he be-
came the subject of many news and scholarly articles that profiled his
intelligent, tool-­using behavior.53 Today, he reappears as an early ex-

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ample of the media studies concept of “techno-­orientalism.”54 I wish

to build on this previous scholarship to reconsider Fu Manchu, not
with a mere nod to “feline” attributions by his creator, but with an
emphasis on his racialized, cinematic, queer animality. Fu Manchu’s
animality has not been extensively considered, and I suggest that it
provides a particularly useful example for reading covert animaliza-
tions in cases where racialized queering is already at stake.
Fu Manchu came to life in a series of novels written by the British
author Sax Rohmer (the pseudonym of Arthur Sarsfield Ward) from
the 1910s through the 1950s. Apparently, Rohmer had never been out
East, only to his local Chinatown. As a writer, he seemed to be tit-
illated by his own observation that broad informal networks of sup-
port among immigrant Chinese resembled the queer kinship of
British “sworn brotherhoods,” complete with ulterior logics and alle-
giances, if not also swirling, mysterious sexualities.55 The novels’ mas-
sive popularity in both Britain and the United States was driven by
the sentiment of the Yellow Peril in each region concerning the rise of
Chinese immigration and labor in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, as well as shared fears about rising East Asian powers
in the mid-­twentieth century. Rohmer’s series in particular achieved
immense popularity in the United States; the novels in turn inspired a
series of Fu Manchu films produced in Hollywood, which premiered
in the late 1920s (with a special concentration of movies appearing in
the 1960s), as well as a short-­lived television series.56
These wildly popular films constituted a genuine mass-­media phe-
nomenon, one so powerful that even today Fu Manchu is a recogniz-
able “type,” a shorthand for many Asian stereotypes. The films also
provided a consistently extravagant imaginary visual and narrative
fount through which to define U.S. citizenship against Asian moral
decline. In 1942, the Chinese government protested that the Fu Man-
chu film then under production would offend a wartime alliance be-
tween the United States and China; the film was suspended in re-
sponse. That a film was taken as an interest of the nation not only
reminds us of the centrality of the Hollywood industry to bolstering
U.S. nationalisms, but affirms that the exotophobia of the Fu Manchu
novels and films was consonant with contemporaneous policies de-
signed to minimize Chinese attempts at citizenship.57 His appearance
on the cultural and national stage was thus accompanied by policies in
which Chinese identity was subject to various controlling efforts, in-

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cluding legal efforts at containment, exclusions from citizenship, and

public health strategies.58
The character of Fu Manchu is described in an oft-­cited compen-
dium of terms laid out in an early Rohmer book, The Insidious Dr. Fu
Manchu: “Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-­shouldered,
with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-­shaven
skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-­green. Invest him with
all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one
giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with
all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, how-
ever, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that
awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-­Manchu, the
yellow peril incarnate in one man.”59 Here, Fu Manchu is depicted as
an extranational agent with limitless resources. He is a perverse “race
man,” sinister and intelligent (with a brow like Shakespeare, which
interestingly hints at a cultivated intelligence threateningly border-
ing on “white”) and endowed with scientific knowledge, a potent
means of mastery over the environment and over social and geo-
graphic arenas. To say that Fu Manchu functions as the embodiment
of the entirety of China is not to make too great a claim, for as this
passage notes, within his person he contains “all the resources . . . of a
wealthy government.” Tina Chen notes that while “the surface rheto-
ric of the books condemns Fu Manchu for attempting to build a Chi-
nese empire, the Doctor’s techniques of collection and demonstration
actually mirror Western imperial practice.”60 Moreover, his strength
is augmented, it would seem, by an animal spirit: a specifically feline
cunning, stature, and ocular appearance.
In addition to this circulation of signs, a number of alternately sym-
pathetic and hostile critics, including Frank Chin, Daniel Y. Kim, and
Harry Bernshoff, suggest that Fu Manchu is also homosexual.61 His
queer desire is arguably most dramatized in the Hollywood film The
Mask of Fu Manchu, produced in 1932, starring the popular “monster
actor” Boris Karloff, in which he indicates a certain possessive desire
for the character Terrence Granville, even laying his hands on the bare
chest of Terrence (figure 9).
The story is set in the Gobi Desert, where a group of British and Ger-
man explorer-­scientists have come to nab the death mask of Genghis
Khan before Fu Manchu can acquire it. Here Fu Manchu is, and is not,
“catlike.” Rather, his presumed felinity is subject to the representa-

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9. Boris Karloff playing Fu Manchu. The Mask of Fu Manchu (dir. Charles Brabin, 1932).

tive load of roaming signifiers of catness, resulting in a human-­animal

blend that includes a distinctly yellow face. Fu Manchu’s clawlike
nails, for instance, which we find in a select few of the films, bizarrely
migrate, appear, and disappear, and take on and lose d ­ ecoration.
In this film still, Fu Manchu gleefully leans over Terrence, his hands
caressing Terrence’s bare torso and belly; only a few fingers show the
long nails. In the background stand two statuelike black slaves who
cast shadows against the walls. The stark lighting of the scene washes
out Terrence’s face, which appears very pale in contrast to Fu Man-
chu’s prominently darker visage (Karloff performing in yellowface).
This touch is irrefutably homoerotic, and Fu Manchu’s feminized fe-
linity is itself arguably queer. His long nails, when present, might well
have been a citation of Chinese stereotypes based on “actual” royal
practices. But considering the roles they played in the films and for
viewers as recognizable marks, these feline nails function visually to
compete with Fu’s intellectual renown, altering the perceptual econ-
omy of normative subjectivity by redirecting his sensibility toward
the animal. Simultaneously, his femininity hides as felineness, under-
cutting his otherwise trenchant masculinity by effectively queering it.

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 Queer Animality

At the same time, we might argue that his animality exceeds the
feline. Indeed, from what place comes his wealth of facial hair, simul-
taneously valued as brute, royal, and masculine and as primitive and
barbarian? Fu Manchu is often depicted with his pet marmoset, Peko,
sitting on his shoulder, near the primary site of subjectivity—the
head—suggesting that the monkey “has his ear.” The proximity of
this simian familiar suggests kinship predicated not on shared blood
but on affinity, affection, or some other affective order.
Another image, this from the cover of the dvd collection of the
tv series The Adventures of Fu Manchu, aired in 1956, shows Fu Manchu
with Peko in his lap, grasping its wrists with his hands and presenting
the “paws” of the monkey seemingly in place of his own hands (figure
10). The release of this dvd collection points to the ongoing interest in
Fu Manchu and exemplifies his persistence in contemporary cultural
memory. Here Fu Manchu is seated before a background that includes
Chinese lanterns and a large spider hanging on its web, a classic indi-
cation of sinister traps. A dark-­haired woman in elaborate jewelry and
a brocade top exposing her midriff grasps Fu Manchu’s face and upper
arm, shifting her eyes to the side while he, along with Peko, stares di-
rectly at the viewer, leveling an intimidating gaze.
But what interests me most here is the representation of the em-
brace between the monkey and the human. The hands, viewed as in-
dicators of capacity and creativity (as our most essential tools), class
(as in the category of manual labor), and humanness (in their signifi-
cance to tool-­using evolutionary claims of the opposable thumb), are
placed in relation to the paws of the monkey. Whose manuality pre-
dominates? And what is the force of that dominance? If they refer to
a site of subjectivity, is that subjectivity made more sensible, more
animate? In Steve Baker’s analysis of a variety of contemporary artis-
tic projects involving animals, he discovers a prominence of attention
to hands. He suggests this may not be coincidental: while hands seem
to centrally and uniquely symbolize human creativity, animals them-
selves also seem to be “aligned with creativity.”62
Baker notes that the hand is a central contentious figure in Derrida’s
assessment of Heidegger’s famous claim that the animal is “poor in
world”: according to Heidegger, an ape’s hands are not hands because
they do not represent the possibility of taking intelligent hold, of
grasping something conceptually. What is compelling about Fu Man-
chu’s grasping of Peko’s paws is his presentation of the paws over his

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10. Cover of The Adventures of Fu Manchu (1956). Alpha Home

Entertainment, Classic tv Series dvd.

own. The paws suggest that all that Fu Manchu grasps is animalistic
in nature, or that animality itself drives his will to knowledge and to
creativity. Fu Manchu’s interior animality is a proposition made ex-
plicit and observable in the “pawing” of Fu Manchu’s grasping tools:
his hands. Fu Manchu is not just animal, not just queer: he is porous
along many axes of difference. The clasp of the monkey’s hands is also
a queered embrace, one that exists in tension with the clearly eroti-
cized woman at his side. In weaving between heterosexual, homo-
sexual, and the asexual (the emasculated sissy that Elaine Kim cites),
he mirrors the ambivalently sexualized quality of animals.

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Fu Manchu’s gestural equivocation between hairy masculinity and

clawing felinity literalizes the animalizing appliqués of a colonialist
imagination concerned with its others, and is itself (trans-­)gendered
and transspecies by being rendered as feline. If filmic representations
of racialized characters almost have a tradition of chaotic rendering,
this “chaos” has a particular tinge. The literally animal signifiers circu-
lating around Fu Manchu occur because he is a racialized figure. This
confusion of human-­animal and female-­male signs may well bespeak
the confused other status and the complex materiality of the Asian
male body in North American society, to invoke David Eng’s impor-
tant work on this subject.63
How intelligible is the (or an) Asian body? “Asian American” sex and
gender positions are deeply polarized; the missing Asian male phallus is
countered by a female hypersexuality ranging in representation from
the submissive geisha to the “dragon lady.” Celine Parreñas Shimizu
provocatively describes such racialized hypersexuality as “a form of
bondage that ties the subjectivity of Asian/American women.”64 Such
a sexual-­racial polarization seems in the end untenable, and the Asian
transgender body becomes both eminently possible as the logical (if
socially disallowed) consequence of a significatory overreach, while
at the same time, the Asian transgender body survives as an impossible
spectacle.65 Indeed, Fu Manchu’s queer gendering poses an embodied
threat; the filmic representation of this body, it could be argued, sug-
gests the perceived toxicity of a racially gendered body that simply
won’t behave. This nonbehaving body echoes the strains of the Yellow
Peril, sounding alarms about unwelcome laboring bodies that will not
retreat to their country of origin, as well as about the possibility of a
rising Asian body of power.
While Fu Manchu is, as a fictional construct steered primarily by
non-­Asian producers, made “from without,” Fu Manchu’s “inscruta-
bility” is of a very particular kind. The queer human-­animal blend he
offers to us—undone and redone in every successive representation—
offers no easy roadmap, despite revisitations to this archive by scholars
decade after decade. Available and unavailable for reading upon read-
ing, this is a “wily” figure indeed; to the extent that animality vari-
ously and multiply subtends the human, I wonder whether he might
be thought of as claiming animality, rightfully claiming animality, the
animality that we all have and that some of us hide, as a part of his
righteous defiance of Western orders of rule and knowledge.

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Coda: Visaging Travis

How do past and contemporary sexual publics articulate figures of
animality? How do urban and rural containments such as “China-
towns,” “ghettoes,” and institutions such as prisons produce and main-
tain queer animalities? When and where are such tropes not affectively
charged and animated without relation to colonial impulses? When
does disability—glossed cynically as pathology, partiality, old age, and
contagious disease, and, alternatively, as machinic cyborg and as natu-
ral variation—come into play? When is human “animal sex,” whether
bestial or queer or rapacious, racially intensified? How are particular
“animal” species racialized through specific trajectories of “human”
engagement? How do artists work such proximate borders? Some of
these questions are returned to in the next chapter. To take the play
of meanings seriously means that animality must be considered as a
complex thing, material, plastic, and imaginary, at least in coforma-
tion with other concepts such as wildness, monstrosity, bestiality, bar-
barity, and tribality, as well as what it is to be human. This is the stuff
of animacy theory.
Finally, how to reconcile animals and their strange temporal pres-
ence with the temporality of color? For racialized color, arranged as it
is along hierarchies of labor and of primitivity in contrast to moder-
nity, has also been resolutely attached to the past. What body presents?
How is that body articulated, even before it speaks? What does it mean
for a presenting body, a living body, to shift between white presence
and a queer racialized past, between animality and humanity? These
human-­animal bodies and figures not only fatally but perhaps pro-
ductively literalize this endless blend. And so this chapter might be
thought of as an invitation to consider queer animality not just as
a component of technofuturity, but as a site of investment, a com-
mitment to queer, untraceable, animal futurities, morphing time and
raciality.
Earlier in this chapter, I declared that I was pointedly focusing on
representations of animals rather than their “real” counterparts. Yet I
self-­consciously end with a discussion of the strange affective politics
conjured by the events of and following February 17, 2009, in which
a living chimpanzee and former tv animal star named Travis “went
berserk” and mauled a woman named Charla Nash (a friend of his
owner, Sandra Herold), destroying her nose, hands, lips, and eyelids.

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Travis had been reluctant to go in for the night to the home he shared
with Herold; Herold called Nash for help. According to Herold, after
arriving in her car, Nash approached him with a stuffed toy before her
face, and then, by moving it aside, revealed her face, which had been
altered by a new hair cut and a makeover. This makeover is codified,
of course, as an acceptable disruption of the historical contiguity of
individual personhood. We do not know, of course, whether it was
her doubled switching of facial presentation that enraged or unsettled
him, though Herold herself wondered whether this was so; and it was
certainly Nash’s face that received heightened damage and was the
focus of Travis’s attack, along with her hand.
After some efforts to stop his attack, Herold called 911: “Oh, my god!
He’s eating her! He’s eating her face! Shoot him, shoot him!” Herold
later explained, “I had to save my friend,” meaning Nash. The respond-
ing policeman, whose safety seemed threatened by the chimp, who
had approached his police vehicle, shot and mortally wounded Travis.
Herold, as Travis’s nearly lifelong legal owner and human compan-
ion, shared wine with him in the evening, gave him Xanax and other
pharmaceuticals, and shared his bed. Indignant comments condemned
her ownership of Travis, saying that one should never keep a “dan-
gerous” chimpanzee privately as Herold did, and that there are more
appropriate places for them (presumably nature reserves and animal
conservation parks). Yet, the “private” realm, while constructed as the
inviolable civil right of all under U.S. liberalism, is politically, eco-
nomically, and racially determined. That the privacy of Herold and
Travis’s intimate unit (other pictures show them smiling for the cam-
era and kissing on the lips on their home’s front steps, with Travis’s
arm around Herold’s shoulder) was deemed condemnable and retro-
actively fallible—even “sick”—is similar to the declaration of the pub-
lic right to conduct surveillance of the private sphere when certain
improprieties are at stake. This is reminiscent of the enforcement of
homosexual sodomy laws in the United States until Lawrence v. Texas
was decided in 2003. That is to say, this is a story that vexes the con-
trols of public and private space. Travis’s tale is a one of a tenuous and
failed kinship, one in which he had been a vital participant, finally for-
sworn. His actions seemed to call for Herold to activate a militarized
response (“Shoot him!”), though after being shot by the police officer,
Travis tragically retreated into the house he shared with Herold and
into his personal cage, where he died.

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In view of the relationship of racialized affective surfeit to milita-

rized control, it is not so remote to consider the value of Travis on the
public stage as not only a species experiment but as a racialized one
that mediates between imprisonment and death. One controversy that
followed involved a New York Post political cartoon depicting a chim-
panzee shot by a police officer, with the caption, “we’ll have to find
someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” arguably forcing the
chimp’s referent toward President Obama.66 Like a latent blackness
(indeed, black masculinity) that spilled beyond its tenuous threshold
of racial equilibrium, it was up to the (police) state to step in, cor-
rect, and mediate. The social and individual experiment Travis and his
species represent speaks directly to the “visaging,” the enfacement,
referred to in some divides between humans and nonhuman animals,
an enfacement which is implied in the primacy of the sentience-­
affording visage for vegans who do not eat anything “with a face.”
It is interesting to consider what will become politically of the re-
search which has revealed that macaques seem to possess several brain
areas (as identified by fmri, functional magnetic resonance imag-
ing) within which cells are specialized for face recognition, whether
human, animal, or cartoon.67 This result bears some similarity to
cognitive-­linguistic research that shows that language is but one of
a realm of cues that animate conceptual imaging. We also have to re-
member that humans are not the only possessors of sentience; such a
view legitimates (and, according to some thinkers, necessitates) a turn
toward various realms of “actuality,” whether biological research or
animal research or engagements with “actual animals.” At the same
time, the notion that nonhuman animals have a special interest in
faces as faces, whether animal, human, or cartoon, demonstrates an
inevitable porosity and interchange between “realities,” even if human
scientists might not be able to diagnose the epistemic status of each
example to a nonhuman animal, that is, the relationship each example
has to the “real” for that animal.
If there are inescapable materialities by which we live, it is also true
that in many more circumstances than are often acknowledged, what
is real is what one thinks is real. Ultimately, my point here is not to
naively assert that nonhuman animals must certainly have in quality
and quantity direct analogues to “human” capacities. With a nod to
the section that opened this chapter on animal language and sentience,
I wish to share my doubt about nonhuman animals’ simplistic or tem-

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platic exclusion from such capacities, since even at the level of scien-
tific research there are increasing numbers of ways in which, as these
capacities are refigured away from previous, implicitly anthropocen-
trist constructions, nonhuman animals come to share with humans
certain territories of sense, percept, cognition, feeling, and, indeed,
language.
In the aftermath of Travis’s attack and death, the politics of (dis-­)
ability also loom large in the form of questions about what counts as
a proper or livable life (including Travis’s) in the complex biopolitics
of human and animal worlds. One respondent to the New Haven Reg-
ister’s coverage of a Oprah episode in 2010 which hosted Charla Nash
after her release from the hospital, wrote, “Seeing her face and the
damage done it really looked like they sewed the chimps [sic] tongue
on the center of her face . . . I must confess about thoughts inside my
head made me ask if she was better off dead . . . but I get this feeling
this woman is strong and is loaded with love and is loved deeply by
her family and friends, so it is love that will keep her going.”68
“Better off dead” recalls the equation mentioned in this book’s intro-
duction between disabilities marked as “severe bodily perversions”
and the cancellation of the life that holds them.69 Bodies worthy of
life: as the disability theorist Paul Longmore has made clear, there are
intimate relationships between euthanasia and eugenics discourses,
a dependency within the history of euthanasia on the construction
of unacceptable disabilities.70 Furthermore, the passage’s repeated in-
vocation of “love” further reminds us of the belief in the corrective
and rehabilitative possibilities of affective politics (especially of legiti-
mated kinship and intimacy structures)—affectivities which the ex-
changes of patriotic fervor and trauma in times of war demonstrate
so soundly.
Finally, the commenter’s sense that Travis’s tongue and the area sur-
rounding the central portion of Nash’s face had been sewn together in-
tensifies Herold’s own pronouncements in the 911 call that Travis was
eating Nash, or eating her face, putting both the normal human con-
sumption of other animals’ flesh and the common understanding of
heightened consanguinity between humans and chimps in stark irony.
Both comments, though they are quite different interactions, tell a
tale of transposable, cosubstantial matter and of interchangeable kind.
But this human-­chimp consanguinity, studied, charted, and affection-
ately hierarchalized within primatology, was a different, proximating

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consanguinity than that alleged between the Chinese and rats, which
rendered them similarly murky, fungible, interchangeable, and com-
fortably distant (from “us”).
The sewing of Travis’s tongue to Nash’s face threatens a symbolic
violence to human integrity that is in spite of its extension of inti-
macy. On a human face, one finds a chimp tongue that symbolizes not
the subjective promise of human language but something “almost the
same, but not quite,” to cite Bhabha’s famous rendering of colonial
mimicry, a tongue suitable merely to its “animal functions.” The image
of Travis’s cannibalizing of Nash communicates an apparently horrific
intimacy. Like Mary Shelley’s monster created by Dr. Frankenstein,
the cannibal image is foretold by a haunting of whiteness, a troubling
of boundaries that is not only racialized but also sexualized.71 Ulti-
mately, that “an animal” attacked a human here seems but a sideshow.
If the attack first appeared most surprising, the tale now seems one of
a family gone terribly wrong.
The aftermath to the tale was that Nash was not only on the mend
but on a search to acquire a better face and hand via transplant, even
as the other protagonists had ceased to live. (Not only was Travis him-
self fatally shot on the day of the incident, but Sandra Herold soon
after died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm; her attorney explained that
she had died of repeated heartbreak.) But one hospital has already
rejected Nash as a candidate because it could not perform a simulta-
neous hand and face transplant from the same donor. A representative
from the hospital explained that Nash would need sight (which the
face transplant would presumably restore) to retrain her new hand, so
it was not as if she could easily choose one over the other. Only a near-­
complete functional replacement, a restoration of both signal sites
for Nash’s sentient capacities, seemed to make any operation worth-
while. At that moment, somewhere in the world, a heated discussion
about whether chimps could successfully donate hearts to humans was
under way.

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 4
Animals, Sex, and Transsubstantiation

I suggested in the first chapter that in animacy’s instantiation in

Western epistemologies, its coercivity consists of both mundane
and exceptional reinforcements. Animacy spans enforcements and
governmentalities: not only does it inform state policy, but it is also
articulated overtly and implicitly as a “way of life.” Austin’s “monkey
marriage” not only defines the proper field for marriageable subjects,
but also defines fields of impropriety, including the claim or right of
nonhuman animals to enjoy civil liberties. Speech is not necessary to
this conception, and indeed, linguists have relinquished mastery over
animacy even as they have attempted as best they could to track its
materialization in language.
Animacy hierarchies in Western ontologies are about kind: they as-
sert that this group is affiliated with these properties (for instance, the as-
sertion that “animals lack language”). In such a hierarchy’s conceptual
life, kinds are equated with propensities; but in the maintenance of
kinds, the hierarchy simultaneously assigns kinds a generativity, map-
ping and marking reproductive and nonreproductive bodies. Repro-
ductivity in its signal bodily and material sites thus plays a key role in
contentious debates about the borders between kinds. When carefully
managed cross-­animate realms change, so must the biopolitical stakes
around their realignment. Continuing the previous chapter’s concern
with queer animality, I turn here to take up questions of materiality,
animality, and transness, demarcating the “proper boundaries” around
 Chapter Four

both nonhuman animals and humans so that the drawn biopolitical

relations among them can be made more palpable.
I further consider the epistemological and temporal lessons made
possible by thinking about animality in terms of sex: in this case, its
regulation, its contestation, and its purported desexualization. Indeed,
in this chapter’s take on “transness,” I focus on how animal-­human
boundaries are articulated in terms of sex and gender by examining
perhaps the most consistent missing morphology in cultural represen-
tations of animals: the genitalia.1
If mattering turns irrevocably on gender—if, as Judith Butler
writes, questions of gender are irretrievably interwoven with ques-
tions of materiality, and if human substantiation enduringly depends
on the expulsion of animals—then it is imperative that we ask ques-
tions not only about how animals matter, but how they matter sexu-
ally.2 To examine the transness of animal figures in cultural produc-
tions or philosophical discourses (beyond their biology, queerness, or
pure animality, for instance) is to also interrogate how humans’ ana-
logic mapping to and from animals (within imagined, lived, or taxo-
nomic intimacies) paradoxically survives the cancellation wrought by
the operations of abjection, casting a trans light back on the human.
By considering the simultaneous relevance of race, gender, sexuality,
and geopolitics in animal studies, this chapter builds on recent work
that treats animal spaces intersectionally.3 It makes use of the simulta-
neous mobility, stasis, and border violation shared among transgender
spaces and other forms of trans-­being: transnationality, transraciality,
translation, transspecies. This is not to conflate these various, impor-
tantly distinct terms, but to instead try to think them together in new
constellations.
Making the astute observation that “biology has always meant the
thing itself and knowledge of what it is, and equally notoriously,
these two biologies have not always been identical,” Sarah Franklin
dubs “transbiology” an intensified making of “new biologicals” via
“the redesign of the biological in the context of contemporary bio-
science, biomedicine and biotechnology.”4 She identifies what might
be thought of as a significant shift in the specific depth of imagi-
native technologies in crafting matter, a shift in the participants of
what Charis Thompson has called “ontological choreography.”5 Here,
thinking less in terms of biotechnologies than attending to the role of
visual representation and morphology in mattering, I turn directly to
the “trans” in “transbiology,” redirecting it toward transsubstantiation.

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Changes in biology today are tweaking the delineation of kinds.

Pharmaceuticals are composed of nonhuman biological material, clon-
ing and stem cell technologies deploy blends of human-­nonhuman
animal material, and so on; this affects the “sex” of reproduction and
fudges lines of lineal descent. Yet it is important to reiterate, for all the
significance of today’s biotechnological chimeras, that human-­animal
mixings have already existed in the realm of discourse. In an unstable
realm of animacy, relational exchanges between animals and humans
can be coded at the level of ontological mediation, or alchemical
transformation, one that goes beyond a vitalism that infuses given
boundaries with lifeliness. I read these productions as participating in
the animacy hierarchy by exercising a kind of substitutional, horizon-
tal logic of species displacement (altering kind), intervening with the
slower, largely lineal pace of the sexual reproduction of species (re-
placing kind with kind). In certain cases, I suggest it is by interactions
of substance with human countervalences—(trans-­)­substantiation—
that animals may achieve their final form (for humans) or, more sig-
nificantly, by interacting with animal countervalences that humans
achieve their final form. This transsubstantiation has repercussions
outside an intellected analogy. It extends beyond intimate coexistence
in that it is not only substantive exchange, but exchange of substance,
and thus cannot be understood in terms of pure ontological segre-
gation. In some sense, the animate leakage within the strictest hier-
archy is what paradoxically enables that hierarchy to become what it is
imagined to be; biopolitical governance, conspiring with the “rehom-
ing” assertions of those who traffic wrongly, steps in over and again to
contain these leaky bounds.
The terms “animal spaces” and “animal places” are used by Chris
Philo and Chris Wilbert in an articulation of critical animal geogra-
phies: animal spaces signify the kinds of domains in which nonhuman
animals appear and inside which they come into particular being (such
as experimental animal labs); animal places signify the “proper loca-
tion” of animals in a human typology.6 Myra Hird writes that “non-­
human animals have for some time been overburdened with the task
of making sense of human social relations.”7 In my view, race cannot
be forgotten as an endlessly variable human social relation for which
animals are, also variably, tasked to do constant symbolic work. Given
that humans, as indefatigable denizens of the symbolic, inherit such
responsibilities and project them onto nonhuman animals, the trick
seems to be to objectify this symbolic responsibility given to non-

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human animals, as well as our dependence upon their symbolic labor,

and to contextualize it such that our ideas about animality are not
automatically reliant affectively or structurally upon this dependence.
In the pages that follow, I begin with biopolitical concerns regard-
ing the regulation of animal sexuality, and the interruptions to ani-
mal places wrought by the kinds of animal spaces discussed later. I
then turn to the realm of cultural production, bringing into sugges-
tive conversation several late-­ twentieth-­century instances drawn
from the realms of film, popular culture, contemporary art, and ex-
perimental video, each of which ostensibly juxtaposes nonhuman ani-
mals to humans in ways that crucially implicate sex and gender as well
as kind. Two of these instances engage—or provoke considerations
of—Asian cultural formations, one more transparently or legibly than
the other: the film Max, mon amour by the Japanese director Nagisa
Oshima, involving a human love affair with a chimpanzee, released
in 1986; the other, a live installation by the Chinese artist Xu Bing,
“Cultural Animal,” involving a live pig and a humanoid mannequin,
released in 1994. Each instance that I examine—the rhetoric of animal
neutering, a film about a love between a chimp and a woman, Michael
Jackson’s video morphing into a panther, and a performance with a pig
that copulates with a human form—plumbs animals’ symbolic force
within particular imprints of racialization, sexualization, and glob-
alization in an era of geopolitical contestation and coloniality. These
cultural productions literalize a human-­animal ontological mediation,
demonstrating for us its animate currency.

Neutering into Modernity

It has recently become newsworthy in the West that China’s “pet
ownership”—wherein nonhuman animals live within privatized
homes—is on the rise. Pampered, cared for, and loved, Chinese pets
are increasingly invoked and experienced as family members. This
reemergence of pet ownership (whose closest antecedent is found
among early Chinese royalty) has coincided with increased attention
by municipalities and communities to the management of popula-
tions of nonhuman animal species within cities (rural animal owner-
ship is another matter). Seeking to regulate the uncontrolled spread of
these animals, municipalities are increasingly demanding that owners
spay or neuter their new kin; and a growing industry of pet-­related

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products are finding an eager market, what has been called the “pet
economic sector.”8
Cindy Patton employs the term geophagia to refer to the tendency
of nation-­states to promulgate and reproduce themselves elsewhere;
she diagnoses the U.S. Constitution as itself geophagically imagined,
as a template that actively sought to instantiate itself in the context of
other nations. Such geophagia can be construed as a temporal paral-
lelization to achieve political synchrony: Patton suggests that Taiwan’s
repeal in 2002 of a ban on the conscription of gays into the military—
a political decision about sex with decidedly national effects—is not
only a reach for proper statehood, but an indicator of its reach for
inclusion in modernity, alongside (or even ahead of ) other power-
ful nation-­states that serve imperially to define or exemplify the very
meaning of modernity.9 One can find markers of geophagia in a New
York Times article published in 2010, “Once Banned, Dogs Reflect
China’s Rise,” which declares that a pet dog named Xiangzi serves as
a “marker of how quickly this nation is hurtling through its transfor-
mation from impoverished peasant to first-­world citizen.”10
The transformation Xiangzi indexes is toward China’s citizenship
and prosperity, two signal markers of “development” discourses. The
law professor Chang Jiwen, the Chinese sponsor of a dog-­eating ban
for submission to the National People’s Congress, is quoted as reason-
ing that the nation’s “development” should have consequences for the
treatment of animals: “Other developed countries have animal pro-
tection laws. . . . With China developing so quickly, and more and
more people keeping pets, more people should know how to treat ani-
mals properly.”11 While the notion that China is a “developing nation”
has become something of a global spectacle, that development may
feel slightly more ironic from within China’s borders and around its
territorial edges; in the midst of “development,” the increase in tran-
sient feminized labor, migrant work, senior care, and territorial insta-
bility is a steady counterpoint to the prospect of a rising middle class.12
Michael Wines, the author of the New York Times article, suggests
that the one-­child policy has created new needs for dogs in households,
either to augment numbers (this seems to subvert the notion that the
sizes of families mattered in part because more children meant more
contributing economic producers), or to replace children who have
grown up and left home. Wines’s speculation that one-­child families
in China experience a kind of social deprivation that they then act to

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fill with pets only superficially aligns with the “critical pet studies” in-
stigator Heidi Nast’s work tracking the rise of “pet-­love” feelings and
discourses in post-­industrial sites, where new configurations of wealth
and alienation foster new commodifications and emerging neoliberal
affects that shift the status of both animals and human-­animal rela-
tions.13 While Wines understands that extant kinship relations texture
and condition pet ownership, one wonders whether his speculative
association of one-­child families in China with loneliness—compared
to, say, the cultivation of smaller numbers associated with middle-­
class families in the United States—has anything to do with implicit
assumptions that families in developing countries have an emotional
attachment to large broods.
Nast writes that the growth of pet-­animal affective bonds emerges
from new economic configurations:
The libidinal economies of pet-­animal dal [dominance-­affection-­
love] have expanded and deepened in certain post-­industrial spaces,
something I surmise is fueled by a dual process: the hypercommodi-
fication of pet-­lives and love (especially dogs); and the many alien-
ations attendant to post-­industrial lives and places, whether these
be related to the dissolution or downsizing of traditional family
forms, the increasing footlooseness of individual and community
life, or the aging of post-­industrial populations. The dual process is
in any event tied firmly to neoliberal processes of capital accumu-
lation more generally and the attendant growing gap between rich
and poor.14
Nast’s provocative analysis, coming out of critical geography, might
additionally benefit from thinking more about the role of state au-
thority in extant kinship relations and using less a notion of “post-
industrial places” tout court, which suggests a teleological progression
of capital development toward alienation. She gestures to the eco-
nomic liberalization of some sites not in the United States, making
glancing reference to China, but in my view China’s unique biopoliti-
cal history challenges us to lend important consideration to things be-
yond the political-­economic strictly understood.
As dog ownership rises in Chinese urban areas, cities have instituted
the rule that there can only be one dog per family. New one-­dog poli-
cies, evidence of a different kind of governmental hand, both suggest
that dogs are kin by their obvious patterning on the one-­child kin-

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ship law (as a kind of biopolitical expansion), and provoke friction at

the invocation of kinship on the edges of its propriety. Neutering and
spaying thus becomes central to the question of dog domestication in
sites such as Beijing, which since 2006 has had a “one dog, one family”
policy. “The birth of humans needs to be planned, but anyone can
raise a dog?” asked one incredulous blog post in response to reported
complaints about the limits on pet numbers. “The resources that you
conserve from having less people, you give to dogs? This is a very seri-
ous problem. Are you saying that people are worth less than dogs?”
wrote one Beijing commenter in a discussion debating the viability of
dog ownership.15
The questions provoked by this commenter are central to the de-
bates about the animacy hierarchy, in particular its rigors and failures.
Where and when nonhuman animals serve as more or less proximate
members of human families (or the human family), cultural mappings
between nonhuman animals and humans cluster around questions of
sex, regulation, substance, and biopolitics. Paradoxically, neutering or
spaying animals is a preeminent queering device, since the idealized
neutering or spaying halts sexual reproduction, prevents overlittering,
and—in the case of pet ownership—redirects desires to the main-
tenance of pet owner kinship formations within the human house-
hold. Observe the following selected arguments from a typical spay
and neuter website directed to cat owners:
Statistically speaking, even if a person finds good homes for a litter
of kittens, some of the kittens will grow up and produce litters of
kittens.
Even indoor-­only house cats often find ways to get outdoors when
the sexual urge hits them.
Whether they disappear for good (due to panic, accidents, or
enemies) or they return home, kittens are the result.
Unaltered cats have urges that make them irritable and anxious.
They yowl or whine frequently, fight with other cats, and/or
destroy objects in the house.
Neutering lowers his urge to roam and to fight, and thus lowers
chances of disease transmission and woundings.16
I bring these points up not to glorify a restorable natural state, but
to indicate the ways in which the interaction between animals and
humans in the domain of pet ownership discourses is one of biopoliti-

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cal management, a management of reproduction that has both racial-

ized and sexualized overtones. From another direction, queer, lesbian,
and gay folks, with their ostensibly compromised capacity for “bio-
logical” reproductive sexuality, might be likened to neutered.
It is not necessary, however, to take recourse to animals to think
about neutered queers; in chapter 2, I thought about neutering in re-
lation to suppressed or canceled affect in considering the willful sup-
pression of queerness in anti–Proposition 8 ads authored by neolib-
eral homonormativities. In addition, as Cathy Cohen has made clear,
a queer theoretical analysis must consider the queering by the state
of many kinds of bodies as sexually nonnormative, including those
located in class and race disprivilege who might otherwise be de-
fined, or self-­define, as “heterosexual.” “Welfare mothers” are simul-
taneously constructed as racialized wards of the state, misbehaving,
nonproductive creatures who bear their own inordinately large litters
and who are destructive to heteronormative family models because
they are sexually rampant (and thus stray outside of proper sexual and
domestic borders).17 Indeed, the recent history of the United States
has witnessed state-­administered sterilization of poor black, Native
American, and Puerto Rican women; incarcerated women; and people
with cognitive disabilities alike, in the name of eugenically “better-
ing” the population.18 Such animacies, I argue, are mapped and onto-
logically shared among animalized humans and anthropomorphized
animals, and are maintained in mutually defining knowledge streams.
This is the stuff of human-­animal biopolitics, which is at once lin-
guistic, discursive, state-­directed, and sometimes directed toward
“health.” The literalized figures of such human-­animal biopolitics,
the “humanimals,” vary between the traditionally monstrous blends of
human and animal features, posthuman and postmodern cyborg de-
scendants running predictable scripts between organism and machine,
and the benign blends of dogs and cats wrapped in human parapher-
nalia that can be found in rampant numbers on the unapologetically
fetishistic website Cute Overload. But it becomes especially interest-
ing to see how the borders between these genres cannot hold up so
cleanly.
A recent case makes the “monstrous humanimal” and the terms of its
construction ostentatiously clear. Nadya Suleman, the mother of eight
children by assisted reproductive technology, otherwise known by the
moniker “Octomom,” represents a humanimal tentatively racialized

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 Animals, Sex, Transsubstantiation

as nonwhite (her father is Iraqi) whose contingent dignity turns pre-

cisely around her reproductivity. Suleman already had six children
before giving birth to octuplets. It is not clear whether the scandalous
“Octomom” myth is built around the idea that assisted reproductive
technologies were used with the goal of exploiting welfare systems,
or whether this “welfare mother’s” reproductive act itself was so ex-
travagantly successful that it reached the level of caricature. When
Suleman’s house was near foreclosure, peta successfully lobbied her
to place its promotional signs in her front yard and offered her a fee
of $8,000. The sign said: “Don’t let your cat or dog become an ‘octo-
mom’—always spay or neuter.”
Another marketing competitor, the pornography company Vivid,
first unsuccessfully invited her to act in its films (offering her $1 mil-
lion), and then tried asking her to serve in off-­screen work functions
for less money. She declined both. Suleman seemed to welcome a
technology of media attention that sutured diverse advertising inter-
ests to her transmogrified appearance, that is, her own mediated, re-
vised body (with her apparent cosmetic surgery interventions). At the
same time, she rejected an alterative technology of vision and media-
tion whereby her involvement in or proximate to human sexual acts
would be explicitly commodified. Both peta and Vivid were some-
what unimaginative in their marketing decisions: the porn company
clearly partook of an unsurprising frenzy of curiosity around her spec-
tacularized body. Suleman-­as-­Octomom is an overdetermined varia-
tion on the racialized, sexually rampant welfare queen who herself
nurses improperly on the ghostly public teat, a teat that, inasmuch as it
exists, is shrinking and retracting under renewed neoliberal retrench-
ment in the United States under the sign of fiduciary urgency. Yet she
ambivalently occupied the zone between welfare queen and entrepre-
neur, as she leveraged her own economy of spectacle to make capital
decisions.

Transgenitalia
In extending biopolitical thinking to stretch around humans, animals,
and human animality, what would it mean to invite a queer and trans
critique in the instance of animal neutering and castration as they both
literally and symbolically appear? The dance between queer and trans
evokes debates that have been taken up in recent scholarship, particu-

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larly about what degree one might excavate the trans in what has been
taken and subsumed under the rubric of queer.19 Ultimately, the oppo-
sition of trans and queer suggests a false dichotomy: just as gender
and sex are unavoidably linked, so too are trans and queer. They can
be considered as independent factors that participate in animal spaces.
I use Nikki Sullivan’s provocative invocation of “transmogrification”
to bring transsexuality into an expansive analytic.20 Sullivan wishes
to undo the segregated assignment of various phenomena involving
bodily transformation to specific types of critics and thinkers: for in-
stance, transsexuality to queer theorists, nonnormative body modifi-
cation practices to countercultural theorists and criminologists, and
cosmetic surgery to feminists. The apparent “voluntarism” or “false-­
consciousness” of one versus another of these practices she deems
insufficient justification for their categorical segregation. Haunting
these categories is still another, often construed as tendentious when
applied to humans, but in my view having profound cultural rele-
vance once we consider the significance of castration or the “cutting”
of some kinds of transsexuality: “neutering” and “spaying,” which is
often considered by municipal policy makers and animal advocates.
Myra Hird invokes the feminist biologist Sharon Kinsman to argue
for the idea that human understandings of sex respond not merely
to humanity’s own intraspecies evidences, but also to those of non-
human animals as well, such as fish whose gonads shift from male to
female.21 Concomitantly, Hird importantly does not think of “trans”
as an exclusively human construct, and challenges readers to con-
sider the implications of evidence of transness in nonhuman animals.
Such analysis perhaps suggests a sense of trans that extends beyond
sex alone; as Hird writes, “I want to extend feminist interest in trans
as a specifically sexed enterprise (as in transitioning from one sex to
another), but also in a broader sense of movement across, through and
perhaps beyond traditional classifications.”22
Hence, trans- is not a linear space of mediation between two mono-
lithic, autonomous poles, as, for example, “female” and “male” are,
not least because the norms by which these poles are often defined
too easily conceal, or forget, their interests and contingencies. Rather,
it is conceived of as more emergent than determinate, intervening
with other categories in a richly elaborated space. Much in the way
that the idealized meaning of queer signifies an adjectival modification
or modulation, rather than a substantive core such as a noun, I wish

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to highlight a prefixal trans- not preliminarily limited to gender. As

Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore write, the hyphen
“marks the difference between the implied nominalism of ‘trans’ and
the explicit relationality of ‘trans-­,’ which remains open-­ended and
resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix [in-
cluding gender].”23 Such a prefixal trans- is a way to explore that com-
plexity of gender definition that lies between human gender systems
and the gendering of animals. By mobilizing a different form of trans-­,
I do not mean to evacuate trans of its gendered possibilities. To the
contrary, I reassert the complex, multifactored cultural contingency
of transgendered actualizations and affirm that gender is omnipresent,
though it is rarely monolithically masculine or feminine.
Of the body parts that might be labeled “organs,” the genitals bear
tremendous symbolic weight, particularly in the West and Global
North; this may be an obvious point, given the significance of Freud-
ian psychoanalysis (which attaches formative significance to the visible
difference of sex parts) to Western social tropes. In such schemes,
sexual organs simultaneously impute both gender and sexuality and,
as so many race and sexuality theorists have demonstrated, race and
class. To take but one example, Leo Bersani writes about narratives
of sexual development that “heterosexual genitality is the hierarchi-
cal stabilization of sexuality’s component instincts.”24 Therefore, the
“genitals” are directly tied to social orders that are vastly more com-
plex than systems of gender alone. Genitality is both directly and in-
directly represented in multiple ways, vanishing here, reappearing
there, sometimes prosthetized through other accoutrements (such as
so-­called penis cars). Genitalia are culturally overdetermined, and, as
the seats of reproduction and fecundity, they are sites of biopolitical
interest not only for humans but for nonhuman animals.

Animal Spaces: Max, mon amour

Shifting into the realm of cultural analysis, I wish to consider the bi-
lingual French and English film Max, mon amour, directed by Nagisa
Oshima and released in 1986, a film generally treated within cinema
studies as a surrealist comedy of manners. When the film begins, Mar-
garet (played by Charlotte Rampling), the wife of a British diplomat
named Peter (Anthony Higgins), recounts to her husband that she
has fallen in love with a chimpanzee named Max, purchased him, and

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11. Max and Margaret on an intriguingly torn mattress. Film still from Max, mon amour
(dir. Nagisa Oshima, 1986).

taken the animal home. The film is almost wholly set in the bourgeois
household, with the exception of a forest where Max is searched for
and an asylum where Peter goes to find Margaret. There is a general
prevalence of ornament and artifice to match the civil conduct of the
human characters (hairy, indecorous Max serves as the blatant excep-
tion). The narrative proceeds with the ambivalent games of Peter’s
coping with Max’s entrance into the family, his moving into the family
home, and his resistance to Peter’s erratic mistreatment. Over the pro-
testations of her husband, Margaret insists upon keeping her relation-
ship with Max. A climactic scene ensues in which a rifle changes hands
from Peter to Max and shots are fired, but ultimately the family (in-
cluding Max) is happily reconstituted. Max and Margaret are depicted
in a number of intimate embraces, including spooning tenderly on an
unmade bed, its ripped mattress an indication of their love’s rupture
of the social fabric (figure 11). In this scene, Margaret’s silken clothes,
impeccably made-­up face, and smooth-­shaven, properly feminized
legs contrast with the simian unruliness of the animal. Max and Mar-
garet lie, gently spotlit, in the middle of the frame; their shadows are
cast on the wall behind them within the semi-­circular halo that illu-
minates them. Following some of the recognizable visual motifs of
conventional film depictions of star-­crossed lovers, Max and Mar-

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garet express a purity of devotion that shines in contrast to the squalor

around them.
In the structural climax of the film, Peter and Max, the competitive
suitors vying for Margaret’s attentions, seem to be in literal battle over
and around a gun. It is useful to turn here to a consideration of cine-
matic fetishism, in which onscreen objects displace and entrain desire
for both diegetic characters and viewers. For Freud, the fetish ob-
ject—installed as a displacement of desire for woman, whose castra-
tion (in the mother) was an originary unviewable horror—both “re-
mains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard
against it.”25 Linda Williams’s groundbreaking book Hard Core exam-
ines the role of the fetish in contemporary pornography genres. In a
chapter called “Prehistory: The Frenzy of the Visible,” she attends to
the establishment of the ensemble of social, psychic, and technological
apparati in the prehistory of cinema, in which Eadweard Muybridge’s
“animal studies” of horses and other animals in motion, and later of
men and women, take critical part.26 Within Muybridge’s images of
women, Williams argues, one can detect a fairly resolute fetishization
of women by the surfeit of seemingly necessary companion objects
and by the lack of self-­driven action, whereas the men in images have
been inherently active and unadorned and seem to inscribe the proper
gestural domain of possible action. From this perspective, the peculiar
technological artifice within which precinematic animals were pro-
duced by Muybridge’s locomotion studies—unadorned, mobile, and
focal, yet firmly woven into the scientific discourses of visuality—
gives them an uncertain position in relation to the fetish. In the cli-
max of Oshima’s film, Max has seized a rifle from Peter, who meant to
use it either to keep order or to kill him; when Max runs from spot to
spot in the house, firing randomly, it is not clear whether he intends
to use the gun, or how, or against whom. If the moving, onscreen ani-
mal haunts modern cinema, if the gun is irretrievably phallic, and if
the ape is an uncertain fetish, then what is the substitutional value of
a penisless ape shooting a gun, and for whom?
In this comedy of manners, the rifle potentially competes with Max
as the cinematic object representing perhaps the most blatant viola-
tion of proper and “civilized” action. Yet colonialism has enjoyed just
this coincidence of the two objects, Max and the rifle: to preserve a
peaceful, civil interior, barbarity and wildness on its outer edges must
be extinguished and the barbarians brought under (militarized) con-

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trol. Max is, and is not, an “animal” in the nonhuman sense, just as
a colonized subject is, and is not, a “human” in theories about colo-
nialism. Max’s fully characterized animalness and animality neatly,
though perversely, fall within the lines of Homi Bhabha’s notion of
colonial mimicry, in which colonial discourse produces an other that
is “almost the same, but not quite”; the only thing that is perverse,
here, is what the visuality of the film offers us: the prioritization of
humanized animal figuration (and Max’s animal role) over animalized
humanness. Within the logic of Oshima’s filmic representation, Max
thus symbolizes both Peter’s lack of sexual control over his wife and
his fecklessness as a diplomat in waning colonial times, wherein the
insecurity of the colonialist is revealed by his anxiety over control.
When, at film’s end, the gun is put away and Max is folded into the
happy family at the dinner table, the resolution is precisely a colonial
one; the sexuality that Peter promises, but that only Max can fulfill, is
resolved as Max is absorbed into the family, but precisely as a castrated
animal without the possibility of progeny and which might as well be
the family pet (Bhabha’s “not quite”).
During the climactic scene, in the realm of filmic satisfaction, we
might say that a penisless yet phallic Max supplants the penis of Wil-
liams’s famous “money shot” (which she uses to describe the suturing
of filmic narrative as climax, fetish object, and phallicity).27 Instead
of the “money shot,” however, in Oshima’s film we get a “monkey
shot”: an ape shoots a gun seemingly at random, and what should
feel climactic (indeed, the moment is structurally climactic) feels like
a misfire, a failure, a bad shot. This is similar to some critics’ over-
all assessment of Oshima’s film, which was that Max, mon amour was
just not very good; it was something of a commercial flop outside of
Japan and has been called an “anomaly” and a “misfire.”28 According
to Maureen Turim, who asserts that the film represented Oshima’s at-
tempt to appeal to Western tastes, “Max, mon amour would not prove
to be successful enough with critics or at the box office to elicit much
demand for Oshima as a virtual expatriate.”29 But at the level of the
film, Oshima’s commercial goals need not be identified with his cre-
ative ones. In particular, one might alternatively read his interspecies
project as an achievement of failure, an indicative misfire, a signal of
the emasculated collapse of the colonial upper classes who can only
end up living not dangerously, but ridiculously. It is difficult to miss,
after all, the underside of the “comedy of manners” that Oshima will-

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ingly produced using Max. As Bhabha writes, “The effect of mimicry

on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing.
For in ‘normalizing’ the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-­
Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and pro-
duces another knowledge of its norms.”30
In a critically positive psychoanalytic reading of Max, mon amour,
Barbara Creed frames the film as one example of the new “zoo-
centric” cinema that reflects its interest in resolving questions that re-
main today of a Darwin-­influenced blurring of the boundary between
human and nonhuman animal. Creed notes that Margaret’s desire for
Max foregrounds an even-­more mysterious female jouissance that lies
threateningly outside of the male symbolic order (and thus beyond
the husband diplomat’s ken).31 But we might say too, thinking more
closely about the consequential nature of Margaret’s lover, that Max’s
sexing and gendering is itself unstable. First, the role of language in
Max’s animation, I suggest, is minor. While Max’s linguistic gender is
male throughout, the embodied creature is not terribly convincing
as a chimpanzee. The nonintegrity of the creature is made evident by
the fact that the eyes shift around inside the sockets of the chimpanzee
hood as Max moves, recalling the role of the imperfect ape costume in
the directorial efforts in Planet of the Apes (directed by Franklin Schaff-
ner, released 1968) in effecting no more than a hybrid human-­apeness.
(Interestingly, the English word creature is derived from Middle En-
glish; its earliest evidenced referents include objects of creation, both
human and animal.)
To a camp-­ loving (and perhaps forgiving) queer skeptic, the
middling chimp costume’s lack of any visible genitalia begs further
questions, poor 1980s special effects notwithstanding. To my knowl-
edge, the visual culture of animal genitalia has not been significantly
addressed outside of the domain of scientific illustration. The appear-
ance of animal genitalia in visual cultures surely serves, in any case,
as a reflection of invested human interest in animals. In Making Sex:
Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laqueur’s historical
account of gender/sex ideology reminds us of the historical recency
of the conception that male and female sexes are somehow opposing.
Pausing to reflect on the visual representation of the sex organs of
nonhuman animals, Laqueur comments that our species cares little
that, say, the genitals of a female elephant are rendered to look like
a penis in an 1881 scientific illustration, “because the sex of elephants

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generally matters little to us.”32 Yet animals considered to have analo-

gous properties to humans (such as the great apes, or those which
have been the subject of agricultural research), presumably bear more
weight of interest in their sexual particularity.
While in Max, mon amour such an absence of obvious genital fea-
tures, all else being equal, might possibly (but not necessarily, given
the visibility of certain female displays!) provoke a tentative reading of
the figure as female, it is also true that the default movie sex for cos-
tumed monkeys and apes can remain unspecified, genderless, in a lit-
eralization of the generic unsexed animal type. (This is true, of course,
of the vast majority of representations of fictional humans, animals,
and monsters alike, from Ken dolls to Donald Duck to cartoon abomi-
nable snowmen, in which the male genitalia are rendered as curved
bumps. Female counterpoints like Barbie also lack genitalia but have
fully developed, even exaggerated, secondary sex characteristics.) In
addition, individual animal specificities such as sex cannot survive in a
costume unless it is intended as “anatomically accurate,” bucking cos-
tume traditions of neutering. In the somewhat ostentatious case of
Max, such undeterminability of visual sex is an indication of the am-
bivalence with which cultural spaces confront animals as sexed crea-
tures.
Conveniently perhaps for the design of the film Max, mon amour,
no linguistic contradictions need be enacted: the French grammatical
gender for chimpanzee (le chimpanzee, lui, il ) is the same as the pur-
ported gender and sex of the chimpanzee Max, who is supposed to be
a masculine, male chimp. Yet for all the profusion of linguistic gen-
der, in Max, mon amour, the incursion of species difference also intro-
duces the presumably threatening possibility of a genderless relation,
produced by the genericity of the type but literalized in the costume
itself. Margaret and the chimp’s affections thus yield something that
is trans in the sense of the undecidability, elusiveness, or reluctance
toward the fixity of the chimp’s sex, which in spite of its linguistic re-
inforcements surpasses its otherwise presumptive maleness; that is, to
what extent can one trust that a male chimp is sexed or gendered “like”
a human male?
What cannot be ignored in Max, mon amour is the virtual stam-
pede of Africanized racial invocations; these are overdetermined by
the diplomatic status of Margaret’s British husband and the Parisian
locus of the film as both a colonial metropolis and an ambivalent host

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to racialized colonial subjects. Such racialized staging is further evi-

dent from moment to moment in the chimp’s expressive limitations;
marked “impoliteness” and unfamiliarity with “civilized” surround-
ings; and surfeit of embodiment, aggression, and emotional lability
in the face of white upper-­class cultural sophistication, formal “good-
will,” and expressive minimalism. All of these factors are conditioned
by seasoned colonial narrative and visual tropes.33
The unstable national provenance of the film arguably enriches the
film’s racial possibility: On the one hand, it can be identified as part of
Oshima’s trajectory outward from Japanese cinema (which he often
stated he despised) and toward, in part, Western cinema, including
European avant-­garde and animal tropes. On the other hand, against
popular external understandings of the Japanese as racially “homo-
geneous,” Japan’s own history with race—including its interest in
black history in the United States—extends far earlier than Max, mon
amour.34 The recognizable fakeness of the costume’s face invites com-
parisons to blackface minstrelsy (which remained popular in Europe
long after it faded in performance cultures in the United States), in
which there lingers the possibility that a mask conceals a differently
racialized human. This lingering possibility undermines the film’s
pointedly surrealist overtones with a historical legacy of European
evolutionary racism tied to colonialism. While blackface practices
have a relatively recent history within Japanese hip-­hop subcultures
and aesthetics, we can also consider the possibilities of citation and
intertextuality with regard to animal tropes, racialization, and facial-
ity within European, U.S., and Japanese film histories.35
Akira Lippit writes that “the complex matrix that adheres to the
name ‘Oshima’ . . . is in fact . . . an intertextual corpus that both does
and does not belong to Oshima himself.”36 Max, mon amour is an un-
reliable barometer of Oshima’s own unfixed authorship within a fluid
transnational frame, one in which the complexities of Japanese race
relations with regard to blackness are both suggested and deferred.
Within film studies, where the film is often treated as a mere foot-
note in Oshima’s canon, there remains confusion over precisely what
the film’s stylistic exceptionality indicates and a concomitant level of
doubt about the degree of this movie’s “Japaneseness” (not only be-
cause of its all-­Western cast and its French setting).37

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Cultural Animal
The intertextuality characteristic of Oshima’s Max, mon amour con-
tinues at a more obvious level in the Chinese conceptual artist Xu
Bing’s installation and performance work “Cultural Animal” (first
shown in 1994), in which a live male pig, with “nonsense” words made
up of letters from the Roman alphabet painted all over its body, was
introduced to a static male mannequin posed on all fours with “non-
sense” Chinese characters inscribed on its body (figures 12.1–12.4). In
front of a curious audience at the Han Mo Art Center in Beijing, the
pig eventually mounted the mannequin, in a sexually aggressive way,
according to descriptions of the pig’s approach. In personal accounts
of this piece, Xu Bing explained that he had applied the scent of a
female pig onto the mannequin, presumably to encourage this sexu-
alized behavior.38
Highly regarded in the globalized art world and the recipient of a
MacArthur grant in 1999, the artist, who moved to the United States
from China in 1990, is consistently interested in questions of transla-
tion, language, and communication beyond or outside human under-
standing, as this work demonstrates.39 He is best known for his in-
vented script of nonsensical calligraphy, or “false characters,” that
frustrates any process of reading (for the viewers who know Chinese)
or translation (for the viewer not literate in Chinese). In “Cultural
Animal,” he literally em-­bodies his false characters by placing them
onto the surface of both an animal (the pig) and an animalized man
(that is, a mannequin whose pose—open to be penetrated from be-
hind—also potentially queers him). What are we to make of this spec-
tacle of animal genitality and its connection to transnationalism and
sexuality?
“Cultural Animal” was developed from a previous performance by
Xu Bing called “A Case Study of Transference” (which, despite its title,
he disavowed as a psychoanalytic project). This work involved two
pigs, one a male boar who had been inscribed with nonsense Roman
script, and one a female sow who had invented Chinese-­looking char-
acters printed on. This earlier iteration, which was also presented in
front of a live audience at the Han Mo Arts Center in 1994, had a
more explicitly reproductive subtext, one that conjured notions of
East-­West racial mixing or miscegenation: the stated intention of the
piece was that the pigs should mate. As the video documentation of

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12.1–4. One live pig, one paper-­mache mannequin, ink, discarded books, cage,
forty-­square-­meter enclosure. Xu Bing, “Cultural Animal,” 1993–94.

the event shows, it was strangely difficult to get the pigs interested in
each other.40 Nevertheless, in this performance, the two illegible char-
acter systems, along with the two porcine bodies, moved alongside
and against each other, and thereby interanimated.
With the substitution of a static human body for a pig in “Cultural
Animal,” Xu Bing thus solved a major logistical problem: he only had
to get one pig to do his bidding rather than two. He also introduced
an interspecies aspect to the piece, though he inverted industrialized
society’s normative animate control relations of (human) subject over
(animal) object by rendering the human static and passive and the pig
active and alive. Stills from the video documentation of the perfor-
mance show the pig mounting the human figure from behind, as well
as nuzzling the mannequin on the face and pressing its neck against
the sculpture’s front arm. The possibility of a sexual act involving a
human with a nonhuman animal raises the human-­perspective specter
of bestiality. In this transspecies encounter, still other possibilities are
raised because of the animal’s uncertain gendering and because its

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sexual status, while undetermined, bears a peculiar intensity: pornog-

raphy, queerness, and cultural and race mixing. In the work’s video and
photodocumentation, the animal’s penetrative capacities are central,
while the mannequin’s own genitals are not rendered easily visible.
What significance should be applied to the apparent reversal of
active human and passive animal? In this representation and perfor-
mance, “the animal” cannot be so easily filled in by the “dead,” “fake”
figure, despite that figure’s quadripedal stance: it is templatically
“human.” If the traditions of human-­animal encounter in represen-
tation and performance privilege or enhance the liveness or subjec-
tivity of the human against the counterexample of the animal, then
“Cultural Animal” scrambles given codes of reading and reception.
In this work, the pig’s Roman-­alphabet nonsense characters brushed
up against and eventually mounted the prone body of the manne-
quin, itself inscribed with false Chinese characters, thereby setting up
a potential power dynamic of submissive and receptive Asianness as
defined against beastly Western dominance. The entire scene, which
was staged on a floor littered with open books, could be read as one
of linguistic and sexual aggression of the “West” toward the “East,”
but let us not forget that the pig also had its tender approaches. What
is more, both the sign systems used here were unstable, illegible, and
hence conjured only a phantasmatic version of both “East” and “West”
as read against and through each other.
“Reading” is an equal participant in the spectatorship of this per-
formance. Xu Bing’s nonsense words are commonly interpreted as
scrambling received semiotic relations between East and West. While
such a lexically dependent strategy might in itself seem a rather obvi-
ous rendering of the impossibility of cultural translation, when juxta-
posed with the actors of the performance and their emergent actions,
this scrambling simultaneously generates a possible critique of the
ready recourse of human-­animal renderings into symbolic certainties
(or the ready assignation of passive mannequin to the “East” and pene-
trating pig to the “West”). What the pointed and productive restaging
of otherwise common priorities makes possible here is a Deleuzian
“becoming-­animal”: without the fixity of animal-­human difference
in place, the audience is provoked into the multiplicity of possible en-
counters of self and other, perhaps even of the dissolution of borders
between animal and human and self and other.
Does the imprinting of nonsensical text and the intervention of ani-

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mality really complicate the dyad of East and West in “Cultural Ani-
mal,” where each faces the other? Xu Bing’s work seems to partake
of some critique of transnational exchange, particularly of Western
hegemonic modes of representation. At the same time, he has espoused
somewhat controversially conservative viewpoints that seem to at-
tenuate a fully deconstructive and dialectical reading of “East” versus
“West,” a reading favored by Xiaoping Lin’s positive review;41 he has
shown no interest in launching a more-­pointed critique of either U.S.
or Chinese politics. As he said in an interview in 2008, “The old con-
cept about art and government being at odds has changed. Now artists
and the government are basically the same. All the artists and the gov-
ernment are running with development.”42 In other words, both art
and government for Xu Bing are aligned with the space of commerce
and the market—or “development,” to circle back to the rhetoric of
pet neutering—which potentially smoothes over political frictions.
At the same time, “Cultural Animal” raises questions about the con-
nection between various forms of trans- encounters, including trans-
national, transgender, and transspecies.
Ultimately, the introduction of species difference in Xu Bing’s
work yields a yawning gap around the unresolved question of gender
and sexuality, precisely around questions of the generic and gender.
If Oshima’s Max, for instance, is a blend between actual (if materi-
alized through costume only) and figural chimpanzee, should there
not be another layer of gender confusion between human/animal and
actual/figure? Carla Freccero suggests there is; she takes up Derrida’s
engagement with his cat in his essay “L’animal que donc je suis.” Frec-
cero notes a degree of creative play between the biological sex and
grammatical gender of Derrida’s female cat (a noun that is grammati-
cally gendered masculine), as well as shifts in Derrida’s vulnerability
and gendered relating to her.43 In a critical scene during which his cat
observes him naked, Derrida’s anxious concerns about gender, mas-
culinity, and sexuality emerge. Freccero notes that Derrida meanders
in address between the masculine, generic le chat and the feminine,
specific la chatte. Derrida thus genders the cat in multiple, potentially
contradictory ways and invites the presumption that the cat’s and his
own gender are forcedly affected by the relationality between them.
I return here to the last chapter’s invocation of Austin’s “marriage
with a monkey.” To this I add the notion that the genericity of “a mon-
key” has certain consequences: a creature without a gender threatens

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the smooth running of heteronormative society that relies on a robust

organization of gender; and its sexed uncertainty threatens to bring a
queer sexuality into the institution of marriage. I suggest that though
Austin insisted in some sense that the performative verbs themselves
(like wed in “I thee wed”) were fixed in purpose and meaning and thus
robust, his attribution of “mockery” to an animality linked to dis-
courses of colonial and species threat reveals, perhaps, a fear that the
institution of marriage (or conventions of language, or rigidities of
gender and sex, or divisions of race and nation) might be maligned
and indeed transformed by a performative’s misuse. The insecurity I
attribute to Austin here is equivalent to a recognition of the impor-
tance of iterative renewal for the performative itself to retain its nor-
mativity.44
Thus, while considering Max’s “bad” costume may seem an indul-
gence or just a “nonserious” joke, Austin’s monkey example suggests
that any decision about including or excluding genitals on a figured
nonhuman animal cannot help but be loaded: species difference itself
is fraught with anxieties about race and reproduction. Thus, trans-
animality can refer to gender and species with sexuality, geopolitics,
and race in full scope. Otherwise put, an analysis of transanimality is
enriched by identifying the quiet imputations of race that are so often
shuttled along with the animal.

Transmogrification
While much has been written of histories in which nonwhite racial-
ized men are often, due to racism, subject to symbolic castration and
representation as nonhuman animals, less has been suggested of the
possibility that the castrated animal is not only a substitute for but
coextensive and forming meanings equally with castrated racialized
men.45 Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, in analyzing the post-
colonial psychic state of a racialized subject, theorizes relations among
animality, castration, and black (sexual) threat, and in so doing offers a
condensed image of the social possibility of simultaneous castration and
phallic presence, even hypermasculinity.46 Given the sacrosanct impor-
tance of the penis or phallus, we might extend the concurrence of cas-
tration and phallic presence to the possibility that nongenitality could
impute genitality or the threat of genitality’s eventual presence. But if
the absence or presence can sometimes be intensified as a threat that

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consolidates maleness, the pairing can also be attenuated in such a way

that transsexuality emerges as curiously legible.
Writing about Michael Jackson—more the phenomenon than the
person—Cynthia Fuchs analyzes the ways that race, gender identity,
and sexuality all intervene to produce a sporadically present phallus
in Jackson. Fuchs comments, “the problem of his penis remains . . .
continually cited by his own choreographed crotch-­grabbing. A sign
of autoerotic sexuality (read: perverse, unreproductive, and homo-
sexual), his unseen penis resists visibility, that prevailing emblem of
Western cultural Truth.”47 In describing Jackson, Fuchs deliberately
and perhaps provocatively uses the term transsexual. She does so not
as a thesis about his lived experience, but rather as a diagnosis for the
emergent sexed interstitiality of Jackson, an interstitiality that evokes
phallic presence as often as it absences it, and that is surrounded by
other kinds of body modification and illusion, including appearances
by Jackson that uncannily approximate the stylings of Diana Ross.
Similarly suspending judgment about Jackson’s transsexuality,
I would like to leaven Fuchs’s account with a consideration of the
animal-­animality that sat next to Jackson for most of his life and ask
what place this animal-­animality might have in his (sexualized) real-
ization. While it might be a simple matter to attribute his affection and
concern for certain specific nonhuman animals to an innocent, “child-
like nature,” as allies did in the hope that it would be effective both as
a defensive explanation amid the discursive intensity that surrounded
allegations of pedophilia both in and outside the juridical sphere, it is
productive to consider his animal interests on their own terms.
Among the most recognized of Jackson’s animal signs was the
morphing black panther in his video “Black or White,” released in
1991 (his frequently photographed companion chimp, Bubbles, was
another). In the video, a black panther walks out of a room, then
transmogrifies into Jackson, who in the original version of the video
goes on to dance with no musical accompaniment and to enact physi-
cal violence on inanimate objects, breaking windows, smashing a car
windshield, setting a building on fire. Was the animal form of the
black panther a reference to the Black Panther Party? The Black Pan-
thers and the larger Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s
have continued to echo within national “multicultural” and “post-
racial” presents in the United States as the most iconic images of black
nationalism and militancy, and so are a potent end to a video whose

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lyrics “it don’t matter if you’re black or white” optimistically declare

that race does not “matter.” In an archived interview with mtv filmed
in 1999, part of a special event celebrating its “100 Greatest Videos,”
Jackson explained:
I wanted to do a dance number [and] I told my sister Janet, I said,
“You remind me of a black panther.” I said, “Why don’t you do
something where you transform into a black panther and you trans-
form into yourself again?” She said, “I like it,” but she didn’t go with
it. . . . The two of us, we always think alike. So I did it. And in the
dance, I said, “I want to do a dance number where I can let out my
frustration about injustice and prejudice and racism and bigotry,”
and within the dance I became upset and let go. I think at the time
people were concerned with the violent content of the piece, but
it’s, like, easy to look at. It’s simple.48
Jackson seems to explain away as serendipitous (rather than premedi-
tated) the nature of his arrival upon the black panther; and indeed, his
choice of the animal may well have been so. But in performing as a
black panther, Jackson admits that he “let go” and acted out his feelings
of racism and injustice. “Letting go” means relaxing into a tendency, a
placement, an embodiment, and detaching from some alienable thing.
“Being” a black panther (or a Black Panther) permitted (a moment of )
the impermissible, both for Jackson as a political figure impassioned
by justice and for Jackson as a man whose masculinity was undeniably
queer. But Jackson’s “letting go” itself conflates two becomings. The
first is a human delivery of frustrated, reactive violence. The second is a
turning into an animal that itself symbolizes or sublimates that frustra-
tion. Thus the panther—in its chromatic blackness and hence human-
oid racialization, its species competence for smart pursuit and capture,
and its capacity for violence upon other animals—embodied, stood
in for, rather than took on, Jackson’s violent affective stances.49 This
is a signal moment, I suggest, of transmogrification as transsubstan-
tiation—for the critical shift is not merely of form, but of affect itself.

Trans-­Connections
Returning to Fuchs’s assessment of the meandering symbolics of
Michael Jackson and his missing phallus, we can widen the argument
to include both the invocation of animality and animals via a shared

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affectivity and Jackson’s gender-­defying “transsexuality.” Transsub-

stantiation succeeds, in my view, unless it is modeled on voluntaristic
transfungibilities that are already considered proper to certain other,
racialized nonwhite bodies. In the case of Xu Bing’s work, sexuality
as a form of racialized, and nationalized, communication by humans
and animals alike is revealed as a fiction, and there remains an obdu-
rate impasse between these transspecial crossings. And indeed, fungi-
bility is not always fantastical or whimsical, but can take on punitive
and disciplinary effects; fungibility is precisely what frames Saidiya
Hartman’s critique of the racialization of black bodies in the antebel-
lum and postbellum South.50
In the case of Max, the fictive chimpanzee in an animal suit in a
fictional film, his transspecies identity is incontestable. Narratively,
Max is a chimpanzee with unruly passions who is deeply attached to
Margaret; visually, “Max” is a chimpanzee costume with no known
sex and a somewhat disembodied voice, barely concealing the actor
inside, who is of unknown sex, gender, and age. The standards of
opacity applied to this actor are much lower than those applied to
Rampling in character as Margaret. The consequences of reading the
not-­so-­chimp chimp are manifold. Another layer is opened up; the
chimp figure, which is already itself a complex blend of species, race,
gender, and sexuality, animates a body without organs, releasing our
determinative hold on the events in the film as the sincere construc-
tion of truth, and allowing surrealist ironies to unfold. What is trans-
animality here is not that we sometimes see the chimp as alternatively
chimp and unskilled human actor, so much as the fact that the pres-
ence of this “flimsy chimp” can serve as a key that enables us to move
outside and away from the overdetermined racialized and other spaces
Max occupies, and to critically read the confluences by which he has
been constructed.
In two successive coauthored works, Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guat-
tari describe what they call a “body without organs.”51 The body with-
out organs is that body that actively refuses its own subjectivity by
engaging the dis-­ordering of its “organs.” In the body without organs,
no given organ has merely one functionality, and the organism itself
cannot be represented as an ordered system. Instead, the body with-
out organs makes impossible any coercive systematicity by affirming
an infinite functionality and interrelation of the “parts” within, “parts”

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that can only be individuated by one of an infinite number of permu-

tations of a body into “parts.”52
Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs essentially describes a
condition of animate transsubstantiation. We can return to Austin’s re-
strictive colorable “capacity” as a condition of the successful perfor-
mative: materialization for Austin succeeds only when a function is
not only present but presumed operative. Austin’s early view of the
performative, while illuminating for a skeletal understanding of the
most discernible instances of materialization, is haunted and ulti-
mately undone by its own animate monkey, which has a color, and
which has, dare we say, infinite capacities to pair, to marry, to cosub-
stantiate.
Quite unlike Deleuze’s “body without organs,” the “animal with-
out genitals” would seem to be a body-­with-­organs-­without-­genitals,
that is, a body with organs from which the genitals have been ex-
tracted or pointedly neglected. Nevertheless, the “animal without
genitals” has an affective valence that warrants closer attention. Just
as biological research on organism systematicity is headed toward a
recognition of more multiplicity, the animal-­without-­genitals marks
or symbolizes a kind of affective impulse toward a human hope. At
the same time, there is a repulsion away from a boundaryless being,
for it reiterates the porosity of the very human-­animal border. Thus,
the animal-­without-­genitals affirms the body without organs, while
carrying dramatically variant affective registers. The ghostly logic
of the racialized castrated human male–present phallus explored by
Fanon and Fuchs is perhaps why, alternatively, the racialized figura-
tive animal that is deployed for purposes of human signification is a
body with organs without genitals, since the (reproductive) body with
organs needs genitals. Furthermore, affectivities, while they may help
leverage narratives to a satisfying conclusion, also yield a result that is
ambivalent about the abjection of animality in the face of the weakly
solidified human, because the analogies are so vibrant and indeed vital.
To move even further to a generative account of transanimality,
what of the transsubstantiation that other animals make possible? Can
we look to the kinds of interspecies redefinitions of biology wrought
in contemporary “dolly mixtures,” to cite Sarah Franklin?53 What
sharedness of transsexuality is possible, and what transitions? The
trans critic Eva Hayward’s article “More Lessons from a Starfish: Pre-
fixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves” takes an innovative approach to

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its own textual materialities in considering the potentials of starfish

flesh (as evoked by a song by Antony and the Johnsons, “Cripple and
the Starfish,” released in 2000) to interrupt normative narratives of
castration, amputation, and regrowth. Thinking of “cut” and its rhe-
torical and onomatopoetic effects and the ontologizing prefixes of re-
and trans-­, Hayward’s essay is written as a “critical enmeshment,” less
a personal account than an “entangling within the stitches of ongoing
processes.”54 Hayward looks to starfish as a kind of species partner in
the sense of sharing a “sensate ontology.” In this conception, limbs, as
not merely absented or “lost” parts but rather as partners in a trans-
speciation, become otherwise. It seems to me that both Hayward and
the song itself might suggest that rather than a penis being fetishized
as the primary appendage, its significance dissolves in its removal into
that of just one limb among many. In this account, the voluntary re-
moval of sex organs leads to a possible kind of rejuvenation in a sense of
completed or completing selfhood: in Hayward’s very moving words,
it is an articulate refusal of the forbidding materiality implicated in
the discourse of the “absenting” of “native parts” that is often leveled
against transsexuals: “transsexing is an act of healing.”55
Still, Hayward’s essay might benefit from a more engaged consider-
ation of disability politics, particularly given the use of the word cripple
in the Antony and the Johnsons song. Claiming transsexing as healing
would be more effective were it more closely tied to disability theory,
especially given the pathologization against the shared motivations
for the negativity leveled against the believed “monstrosity” of both
amputees and transwomen. Like Robert McRuer, Hayward success-
fully invokes disability theory’s complication of the negativity of dis-
as loss, absence, and failure.56 Given this relationship, to celebrate the
agential transformation of trans cutting comes into tension with dis-
ability study’s accounts of amputation, most of which are understood
to be nonvoluntary; hence, Hayward could more fully consider the
affective provocations of the song’s deployment of the word cripple.
This juxtaposition gets right to the heart of current debates around
transness, because transsexuals, much like gays and lesbians, often are
compelled to own a story that tells that they were “born” this way,
in a body that needs to be “fixed” to reach true selfhood (such stories
may be required, for instance, to be eligible for sexual reassignment
surgery). But if we take seriously Franklin’s assessment that there are
ways in which biology is made, not born, then we should be cautious

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about naively romanticizing what Hayward calls the “generative en-

actment of . . . healing.” Perhaps instead, the language of transsubstan-
tiation might provide an alternative way to understand how bodies of
all sorts undergo regimes of regulation, and also how they resist those
regimes.
I end this chapter by invoking a short film, “Range,” screened at the
San Francisco International lgbt Film Festival in 2006 as part of a
curated selection of short films titled “Transfrancisco,” which juxta-
posed rural masculinities (and potentially even transmasculinity) to
the castration of animals. Made by the transgender filmmaker Bill
Basquin, “Range” poetically pairs visual representations of white rural
masculinities in agricultural countryside.57 The film is composed of
muted colors and sweeping landscapes in which human bodies are un-
exceptional and seemingly minor participants. An extensive voiceover
about stewardship refers to the speaker’s interest in “leaving the land
better than when you first came to it,” leaving open the question of
the status of livestock on that land.
The film is marked by an extended scene showing the repetitive
“cuttings” of young lambs at the end of a conveyor belt: the ewes are
getting “tail docked,” and the male sheep are being castrated. Bas-
quin has written that his films present a kind of ambivalence or re-
sistance to queer readings; he understands his works as being “from
a queer point of view without being explicitly queer in subject mat-
ter.”58 At the same time, the castration he depicts in “Range” poten-
tially ironizes a “portrait of quiet reckoning about family relationships
and farming” as well as the trans filmmaker’s relation to reproduction
and to masculinities.59 “Range” stages its scene of “neutering” in rural
North America and is an invocation of thwarted environmental re-
sponsibility and care, of the fragile, sometimes broken ties between
entities who inhabit a shared landscape both inanimate to animate and
animal to human. This film is marked by its studied differential biopoli-
tics regarding the (sexed) animate nature of the co-­construction of
animals and humans.
In the conceptions offered in this chapter, several senses of “trans-­”
have been mobilized and put into conversation: transgender (living
outside normative gender definition or undergoing a shift in gen-
der identity), transmogrification (the changing of shape or form to
something fantastical), translation (across languages), and transspecies
(across species). Each of these terms suggests a movement or dyna-

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mism, from one site to another, as in the sense of “across.” I made the
case for a trans- theorizing that recognizes the distinctness of queer,
but at the same time embraces the collaborative possibilities of think-
ing trans- alongside and across queerness. In analyzing a number of
cultural productions and their (often hostile) articulations or impu-
tations of transness, with the exception of Eva Hayward’s essay, this
chapter worked at some distance from actively claimed (whether human
or not) transgender and transsexual lives and identities. It did not seek
to impose an uncritical or obligatory relation to the reproductive
politics of neutering and spaying, which at so many levels have very
little to do with human trans lives; indeed, such a pat analogy could be
quite offensive if taken at face value. Yet this chapter sought to analyze
and diagnose the cross-­discursive connections already available and
drawn between animals and humans, racial castration and biopoliti-
cal neutering and spaying, under a rubric of transmogrification sensi-
tive to the complex politics of sex, gender, and sexuality. The coercive
conceptual workings of these cultural productions and their way of
crafting forms of cultural exile are premised on already marginal loci
in gender, race, species, and sexuality matrices. Simultaneously, there
are zones of possibility that work around and against such coercions,
such as the analogic survival of transness that can always be purported
back to the human.
Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” is both honored and
merely suggested in the examples elaborated in this chapter. This con-
cept’s simultaneous limitation and promise is precisely that the geni-
tals (or nongenitals) matter, but are not necessarily constrained by
normative gender and sexuality. Even the “animals with/out genitals”
possess a transmateriality that is characterized by a radical uncertainty,
a destabilization of animacy categorizations that mean to keep “kinds”
together, and a generative affectivity; but as Hayward reminds us,
we should not be limited to thinking with and through the simplest
analogies. And so this chapter might be thought of as an invitation to
consider queer-­trans animality within a more porous understanding
of animacy, even in its politically most closed of circumstances, and
not as a tired and fatal venue for human self-­making but as a site of
unpredictable investment for untraceable animate futurities.

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Part III * Metals
 5
Lead’s Racial Matters

Here I pluck an object from the lowest end of the animacy hierarchy:
lead metal, a chemical element, an exemplar of inanimate matter. In
the two previous chapters, I detailed how animality is coarticulated
with humanity in ways that are soundly implicated in regimes of
race, nation, and gender, disrupting clear divisions and categories that
have profound implications ramifying from the linguistic to the bio-
political. In this final part, I bring animacy theory to bear on metals;
first by looking at recent racialized discourses around lead, and in the
next chapter by focusing on mercury toxicity to discuss the vulnera-
bility of human subjects in the face of ostensibly inanimate particles.
These particles are critically mobile and their status as toxins derives
from their potential threat to valued human integrities. They further
threaten to overrun what an animacy hierarchy would wish to lock
in place.

Toys off Track

This chapter considers the case of “lead panic” in the United States in
2007 regarding potentially toxic toys associated with Chinese manu-
facture. I label this recent lead case a “panic” to suggest a dispropor-
tionate relationship between its purportedly unique threat to chil-
dren’s health and the relative paucity of evidence at its onset that the
contaminated toys themselves had already caused severe health con-
sequences.1 I measure this panic against other domestic public health
 Chapter Five

lead concerns, including spectacles of contagion, to investigate lead’s

role in the complex play of domestic security and sovereign fan-
tasy (defined here as the national or imperial project of absolute rule
and authority). I suggest that an inanimate but migrant entity such
as industrial lead can become racialized, even as it can only lie in a
notionally peripheral relationship to biological life. Rather than focus
exclusively on the concrete dangers to living bodies of environmental
lead, which are significant and well documented, I consider lead as a
cultural phenomenon over and above its material and physio-­medical
character.
In the summer of 2007 in the United States, a spate of specific re-
calls and generalized warnings about preschool toys, pet food, sea-
food, lunchboxes, and other items began to appear in national and
local papers and television and radio news.2 In this geopolitical and
cultural moment, the most urgent warnings were issued regarding
toys. Lead’s identity as a neurotoxic “heavy metal” was attributed to
a set of toys whose decomposable surfaces when touched yielded up
the lead for transit into the bloodstreams of young children, giving it
a means for its circulatory march toward the vulnerable, developing
brain. Nancy A. Nord, acting chair of the Consumer Product Safety
Commission, issued a statement that declared, “These recalled toys
have accessible lead in the paint, and parents should not hesitate in
taking them away from children.”3
Descriptions of the items recalled tended to have three common
characteristics. First, they pointed to the dangers of lead intoxication
as opposed to other toxins. Second, they emphasized the vulnerability
of American children to this toxin. Third, they had a common point
of origination: China, for decades a major supplier of consumer prod-
ucts to the United States and responsible for various stages in the pro-
duction stream: “As More Toys Are Recalled, Trail Ends in China,”
reported the New York Times in June 2007.4 These alerts arose out of
direct testing of the toys rather than from medical reports of chil-
dren’s intoxication by lead content in the indicated toys; as one Con-
sumer Reports article said, “our latest tests find the toxic metal in more
products.”5 In other words, no children had yet to fall demonstrably ill
from playing with these specific toys. One image for a lead testing kit,
the Abotex Lead Inspector, shown on the company’s website, shows
a smiling white baby seated next to a plush toy (figure 13). The baby’s
right sleeve appears to have been pushed farther up its arm, so that its

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

13. Abotex Lead Inspector Lead Test Kit.

From the promotional website, 2007.

prominent skin contact with the toy can visibly indicate the intimate
bodily contact between toys and children in the course of everyday
play.
The toy’s obviously facial front naturalizes the toy’s status as a pri-
mary interlocutor for the infant. Its anthropomorphization reifies
parents’ fantasy that the toy must be a familiar and safe substitute for
a “person.” If the toy flower presents a friendly face to the socializ-
ing infant, the testing kit suggests that this idealized scene of inter-
activity has a threatening undercurrent. The logo features a silhouette
of a man’s face and a magnifying glass, a deliberate anachronism that
makes it seem as if this kit will turn a parent into Sherlock Holmes,
able to hunt down clues, searching for visible traces of lead as if look-
ing for fingerprints in a board game murder mystery.
The Abotex Lead Inspector can investigate for a consumer which
toys and other personal effects have toxic levels of lead. Its color-­

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14. Abotex lead color chart. From the promotional website, 2007.

coded test strips can be bought in quantities of eight to one hundred.

Once one uses the testing strip, they can refer to a reference color
guide (figure 14), for which the diagnostic colors range from a “faint
yellowish tint” (the least toxic range) to “medium brown” to “black”
(most toxic). Critical race scholars have usefully parsed the distinctions
between “colorism” and “racism,” investigating how regionally and
culturally specific discourses (including legal ones) regarding tones,
shades, and colors may or may not synch up with relevant discussions
on race.6 Yet the graded valuation of color—the higher valuation of
light shades and lower valuation of darker shades—­remains a popu-
lar habit of mainstream colorism in the United States, and the Abotex
reference chart complies with this chromatic logic.
At the height of the lead toy scare, media outlets paraded images of
plastic and painted children’s toys as possibly lead-­tainted and hence
possible hosts of an invisible threat; guest doctors repeated caveats
about the dangers of “brain damage,” “lowered iqs,” and “develop-
mental delay,” directing their comments to concerned parents of vul-
nerable children. Toy testing centers were set up across the country,
and sales of inexpensive lead test kits like the Abotex Lead Inspector
rose as concerned parents were urged to test their toys in time for
the holiday season in 2007, in effect privatizing and individualizing
responsibility for toxicity in the face of the faltering dysfunction of
the fda and epa, whose apparent failure to regulate these objects was
thrown into sharp relief.
One of the more prominent visual symbols of this recall debacle
was that of toy trains, generally smiling, in different colors and iden-
tities. In this illustrative photograph accompanying an article on the
toy recall in 2007 in the New York Times, an anthropomorphized en-
gine is graphically headed off the tracks (figure 15). The photograph
affiliates the toy panic with one particular toy, Thomas the Tank En-
gine, the eponymous head of the Thomas & Friends series. Originally

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

15. Thomas the Tank Engine headed off the tracks. Lars Klove, New York Times,
June 19, 2007, from “rc2’s Train Wreck,” by David Barboza and Louise Story.

a creation of the British author Wilbert Awdry in a book published

in 1946, Thomas the Tank Engine has spawned an entertainment in-
dustry that today spans the globe; its central significance to the toy
panic is discussed later in this chapter. In this photograph, Thomas’s
open mouth and raised eyebrows suggest surprise at his derailing as
the wooden tracks under his wheels gently curve away. The “maker”
of Thomas & Friends toys, the U.S. company rc2 (whose manufactur-
ing is outsourced to China), also produces Bob the Builder and John
Deere toys, model kits, and the Lamaze Infant Development System;
the prevalence of toys related to construction and industrial trans-
portation reflects a slant toward fostering young masculinities.7
Other media images specific to lead-­tainted toys abounded: stuffed
animals, plastic charms, necklaces and bracelets, teething aids, and toy
medical accessories such as fake blood pressure cuffs (these medical-
ized playthings were particularly ironic, since this toxic toy transposed
expected subjects and objects: children were turned from future doc-
tors and nurses back into the patients of public health). Pictures of
the decontextualized toys alternated with images that included over-
whelmingly white and generally middle-­class children playing with
the suspect toys.

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While notions of lead circulated prolifically, lead itself was missing

from these renderings. Neither the molecular structure of lead, nor its
naturally occurring colors, nor its appearance in raw form or indus-
trial bulk were illustrated. Rather, images of the suspect toys and the
children playing with them predominated in visual representations
of the toxic threat. Even the feared image of a sick American child
that underlay the lead panic was not visually shown, only discussed
in the text as a threatening possibility. Together, the associative pano-
ply of images—the nursery-­school primary color toys associated with
domestic, childlike innocence and security—served as a contrastive
indictment. The lead toxicity of painted and plastic toys became the
newest addition to the mainstream U.S. parental (in)security map.
The ensemble of images seemed to accelerate the explosive con-
struction of a “master toxicity narrative” about Chinese products in
general, one that had been quietly simmering since the recalls in 2005
of soft Chinese-­made lunchboxes tainted with dangerous levels of
lead. Journalists, government offices, and parents drew alarming con-
nections between Chinese-­made products and environmental toxins
apace. Their lists now included heparin in Chinese-­made medicines,
industrial melamine in pet food, even Chinese smog, which had be-
come unleashed from its geographic borders and was migrating to
other territories. The visual representations of Chinese toxicities not
related to lead that flourished in 2007 included rare-­earth magnets
haphazardly arrayed in the intestines of a child’s X-­rayed body; medi-
cine vials; toothpaste tubes; cans of dog food; lipstick tubes; dogs lying
on veterinary tables; and Chinese female workers in factory rows, in
what Laura Hyun Yi Kang has called “one of the emblematic images
of the global assembly line.”8 If rc2 shared legal responsibility for
the lead found in Thomas the train, this fact seemed lost on the news
media; it was the Chinese site of assembly (and the U.S. child as the
site of contact or ingestion) that received the lion’s share of ­attention.9
A generalized narrative about the inherent health risk of Chinese
products to U.S. denizens thus crystallized. But this narrative is a
highly selective one dependent on a resiliently exceptionalist victim-
ization of the United States. Chinese residents are continually affected
by the factories called their “own,” through the pollution of water,
air, food, and soil. A growing awareness of the regular failure of local
and national governments to strengthen protections for residents and
workers from industrial toxins has led to a dramatic rise in commu-

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nity protests, lawsuits, and organized activist movements.10 These in-

dustries are deeply bound up with transnational industrialization, in
which China has been a major participant for decades, as well as the
vulnerabilities it generates. According to David Harvey, the govern-
ments of industrializing nations are tempted to “race to the bottom”
in their striving for participation in systems of transnational capital.
In the process, they are more than willing to overlook unjust labor
remunerations or benefits and the lack of protection from adverse
labor conditions. As a result, local populations and industry workers,
because they are deeply tied to the very environments in which these
industries are animated, must forcibly consume (literally) the by-­
products of those industries.11
Within the United States in 2007, mass media stories pitched Chi-
nese environmental threats neither as harmful to actual Chinese
people or landscapes, nor as products of a global industrialization that
the United States itself eagerly promotes, but as invasive dangers to
the U.S. territory from other national territories. These environmen-
tal toxins were supposed to be “there” but were found “here.” Other
countries, including Mexico, were named in relation to manufactur-
ing hazards; yet, perhaps in proportion to its predominance in world
markets, China remained the focus of concern for the vulnerability of
the United States to consumer product toxicities. It seems no coinci-
dence that just before this year, in 2006, China overtook the United
States in global exports, a fact documented by the World Trade Orga-
nization and widely reported throughout 2006 and 2007.12 This rise
in manufacturing led to fears about the trade deficit, fears hardly con-
tained—and in fact in some sense paradoxically fueled—by Com-
merce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez’s proclamation that the swelling
Chinese output was “not a threat.”13
Alarm about the safety of Chinese products entered all form of dis-
course, from casual conversations to talk shows to news reports. In
what might be called a new, shrewd form of unofficial protectionism,
Stateside citizens were urged to avoid buying Chinese products in
general, even though such products are essentially ubiquitous given
the longtime entrenchment of trade relations between the United
States and China. That an estimated 80 percent of all toys bought in
the United States are made in China is the sign of such entrenchment.
An investigative reporter recounted that attempting to avoid any-
thing “made in China” for one week was all but futile. He wrote, “Poi-

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soned pet food. Seafood laced with potentially dangerous antibiotics.

Toothpaste tainted with an ingredient in antifreeze. Tires missing a
key safety component. U.S. shoppers may be forgiven if they are be-
coming leery of Chinese-­made goods and are trying to fill their shop-
ping carts with products free of ingredients from that country. The
trouble is, that may be almost impossible.”14 One lesson of this panic
was that inanimate pollutants could now “invade” all kinds of con-
sumer products, and other pollutants could always climb on board.
The Chinese toy panic in 2007 was a twist on an earlier theme in
recent U.S. history regarding the toxicity of lead. Since 1978, the year
that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission banned residen-
tial paint containing lead, there have been public-­awareness cam-
paigns and legislation regarding exposure from house paint. Lead-­
based paint is present in many buildings constructed before 1978,
though public-­awareness campaigns and municipal abatement pro-
grams have been quite successful in reducing the threat of residential
lead to the middle and upper classes. More recently, however, envi-
ronmental justice activists from polluted neighborhoods and public
health advocates have insisted that lead toxicity remains a problem
for children in impoverished neighborhoods. Lead poisoning among
black children was thus figured as an epidemiological crisis linked to
the pollution of neighborhoods populated largely by people of color,
including older buildings whose once-­widespread lead paint had not
been remediated, and where lead-­polluting industrial centers were
located. But in 2007, news media coverage this kind of lead toxicity
began to float and fade, overtaken by the heightened transnational
significance of lead. Toys from China quickly became the primary
source of threat, displacing this previous concern.15
I thus argue that a new material-­semiotic form of lead emerged
in 2007. This new lead was, despite its physiological identity to the
old lead, taking on a new meaning and political character and be-
coming animated in novel ways. Why were painted trains and beam-
ing middle-­class white children chosen to represent the lead toxicity
this time? If the spread of transnational commodities reached into
all classes and privileges, how did middle-­class white children morph
into the primary victims of this environmental lead, when poor black
children had previously been represented as subject to the dangers of
domestic lead? Why could only China, or occasionally a few other
industrial sites not in the United States such as Mexico and India, be

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imagined as lead’s source? Ultimately, what, or who, had this new lead
become?

Animate Contaminants
At first glance, lead is not integral to the biological or social body.
In the biomythography of the United States, lead is “dead.” Rather
than being imagined as integral to life, and despite its occurrence in
both inorganic and organic forms, lead notionally lies in marginal, ex-
terior and instrumental, and impactful relation to biological life units,
such as organic bodies of value. The concept of animacy suggests there
can be gradations of lifeliness. If viruses, also nonliving, neverthe-
less seem “closer” to life because they require living cells for their
own continued existence, lead seems more uncontroversially “dead”
and is imagined as more molecular than cellular. The meta-­rubric of
“animacy theory” proves useful here, as lead appears to undo the pur-
ported mapping of lifeliness-­deadliness scales onto an animate hier-
archy. Not only can dead lead appear and feel alive; it can fix itself atop
the hierarchy, sitting cozily amid healthy white subjects.
Furthermore, lead deterritorializes, emphasizing its mobility
through and against imperialistic spatializations of “here” and “there.”
The lead that constitutes today’s health and security panic in the
United States is figured as all around us, in our toys, our dog food, and
the air we breathe, streaming in as if uncontrollably from elsewhere.
Lead is not supposed to, in other words, belong “here.” Even popu-
lar reports of the export of electronics waste to developing countries
for resource mining still locate the toxicity of lead, mercury, and cad-
mium away from “here”; their disassembled state is where the health
hazard is located, and disassembly happens elsewhere.16 Now, how-
ever, the new lead is “here,” having perversely returned in the form
of toxic toys. Lead’s seeming return to the middle and upper classes
exemplifies the “boomerang effect” of what the sociologist Ulrich
Beck calls a “risk society”: “Risks of modernization sooner or later also
strike those who profit from them. . . . Even the rich and the power-
ful are not safe from them.”17 The new lead thus represents a kind of
“involuntary environmental justice,” if we read justice as not the ex-
tension of remedy but a kind of revenge.18
While the new lead fears indicate an apparent progressive develop-
ment of the interrelations of threat, biology, race, geographic speci-

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ficity, and sovereign symbolization, lead’s present-­day embodiment

may not be such an unusual admixture. It is instructive to trace lead’s
imbrication in the rhetorics of political sovereignty and globalized
capital, remaining attentive to what is present and what is absent. If
lead is at the present moment imagined to come from places outside
the geographic West—in spite of the longtime complexity of trans-
national relations—and to threaten definitive U.S. citizenry, then how
might we assess its status against a history of race rendered as biologi-
cal threat, and a present that intensifies the possibilities of biological
terrorism? How might we contextualize the panic around lead as a
hyper-­stimulated war machine in which the U.S. government per-
ceives and surveils increasing numbers and types of “terrorist” bodies?
And how does a context of an increasingly fragile U.S. global eco-
nomic power texture and condition this panic, one that sits adjacent
to discussions of contamination and contagion?
While lead has long worn an identity as a pollutant, associated with
industry and targeted in environmentalist efforts, today’s lead might
first suggest a new development in the domain of contagion discourse.
Contagion can be invoked precisely because the touching and inges-
tion of lead represents, for children, a primary route of exposure, just
as with “live” biological agents. Yet there may be still further struc-
tural forces at play. Priscilla Wald, writing about complex narratives
of biological contagion, has shown how epidemiology itself can be in-
formed by circulating “myths,” understood as stories that are authori-
tative and serve to buttress communitarian identity.19 One could argue
that the black children who disappeared from the lead representations
did so precisely because the new lead was tied to ideas of vulnerable
sovereignty and xenophobia, ideas that demanded an elsewhere (or
at least not interior North America) as their ground. However, as I
will argue later, black children did not quite disappear. In the United
States, the genuine challenge of representing the microcosmic tox-
icity of lead and a human group’s vulnerability to it defers to a logic
of panics, falling back on simplified, racially coded narratives. Such
narratives, by offering ready objects, doubly conceal the deeper trans-
national, generational, and economic complexity of the life of lead.
The behavior of lead as a contaminating, but not technically con-
tagious, toxin (but, again, not necessarily as a pollutant in wall paint
or as an airborne dust) contains many of the elements of Wald’s “out-
break narrative,” a contemporary trope of disease emergence involv-

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

ing multiple discourses (including popular and scientific) that has

been present since the late 1980s. Wald asserts that the specific form
of the outbreak narrative represented a shift in epidemiological pan-
ics because it invoked tales that reflected the global and transnational
character of the emerging infection and involved the use of popular
epidemiological discourses to track the success of actions against the
disease. Lead, however, is not a microbe, not an infectious agent; it
does not involve human carriers like those profiled in Wald’s examples
of outbreak narratives. The lead panic depends not on human com-
municability but the toxicity of inanimate objects, so it is technically
not the stuff of contagion. What it does clearly and by necessity in-
volve, however, is transnational narratives of the movement of con-
taminants in the epidemiology of human sickness. In migration (the
Pacific Rim) and source (China), the lead story significantly resembles
the sars epidemiological and journalistic trajectories of 2002, when
the “outbreak” occurred. Finally, lead’s major route of contamination
is by ingestion, and it is epidemiologically mappable; when lead is at-
tached to human producers, even if transnationally located far away, a
kind of disease vectoring still can happen, even if its condition is not
(even transitively) communicable.

Yellow Terrors
There is in fact very little that is new about the “lead panic” in 2007 in
the United States. At least, we can say that it is not sufficient to turn
to popular and scientific epidemiology’s overapplied cry that con-
temporary ailments bear the mark of this globalizing world’s height-
ened interconnectivities (a cry that says, for instance, that lead travels
more than it used to, which would require us to accept, somehow,
that lead came only from China). In fact, anxieties about intoxica-
tions, mixings, and Chinese agents have steadily accompanied U.S.
cultural productions and echo the Yellow Peril fears articulated earlier
in the twentieth century. That lead was subject to an outbreak nar-
rative works synergistically with these anxieties, and these narratives
may indeed have been partially incited or facilitated by them. One
wonders in particular about the haunted vulnerability of “Western”
sites that Elizabeth Povinelli incisively describes as ghoul health:
Ghoul health refers to the global organization of the biomedical
establishment, and its imaginary, around the idea that the big scary

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bug, the new plague, is the real threat that haunts the contemporary
global division, distribution, and circulation of health, that it will
decisively render the distribution of jus vitae ac necris, and that this
big scary bug will track empire back to its source in an end-­game
of geophysical bad faith. Ghoul health plays on the real fear that
the material distribution of life and death arising from the struc-
tural impoverishment of postcolonial and settler colonial worlds
may have accidentally or purposefully brewed an unstoppable bio-­
virulence from the bad faith of liberal capital and its multiple geo-
physical tactics and partners.20
Povinelli traces a kind of looming materialization, in the form of
threatened health, of the latent affects of imperialist “just deserts.”
The recent lead panic echoes, yet is a variation of, the turn-­of-­the-­
century Orientalized threat to white domesticity, as detailed by Nayan
Shah in relation to San Francisco Chinatown in the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth.21 Shah describes local investments in
white domesticity in this period and its connection to nationalism and
citizenship. Two perceived threats to white domesticity came in the
form of activities believed to reside exclusively in Chinatown: pros-
titution and opium dens. Significant among concerned white resi-
dents’ and policy makers’ fears at the time was the contractibility of
syphilis and leprosy, which was imagined to happen in direct contact
with the Chinese, whether this contact was sexual or sensual in nature.
Notably, they also worried that the passing of opium pipes “from lip
to lip” was a major route of disease transmission; this image resonates
with the licking scene of contamination of the lead-­covered toys, a
scene to which I return later.22 This indirect mode of imagined trans-
mission resonates with the nature of the lead panic, for the relation
of contamination in the case of both the opium pipes (disease conta-
gion) and the new lead (pollution, poisoning) is one of transitivity.
While the imagined disease transmission mediated by an opium pipe
was more or less immediate and depended on proximity, if not direct
contact, between human bodies, the new lead is imagined to be asso-
ciated with national or human culprits somewhere far away.
Since the current reference to lead produces an urgent appeal to
reject Chinese-­made products, and since mentions of China arouse
fantasies of toxins such as lead, heparin, and so on, then in effect, lead
has in this moment become just slightly Chinese (without being per-
sonified as such). That is to say, on top of the racialization of those in-

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

volved, including whites and Chinese, lead itself takes on the tinge of
racialization. This is particularly so because lead’s racialization, I sug-
gest, is intensified by the non-­proximity of the Chinese who are “re-
sponsible” for putting the lead in the toys: that is, lead’s presence in the
absence of the Chinese, in a contested space of U.S. self-­preservation,
effectively forces lead to bear its own toxic racialization. As toys be-
come threatening health risks, they are rhetorically constructed as
racialized threats. This racialization of lead and other substances both
replicates a fear of racialized immigration into the vulnerable national
body at a time when its economic sovereignty is in question and in-
herits a racialization of disease assisted by a history of public health
discourse.
The corrupted Chinatown arguably still lives, albeit now under-
stood as an entire nature covered in irresponsible factories that spread
their poisons far and wide. In the twenty-­first-­century lead panic,
exogenous (that is, “unassimilated”) mainland Chinese still stand to
face the old accusations of ill hygiene and moral defect. Thus, today’s
images of toy-­painting laborers too readily attract narratives of moral
contagion: they demonstrate irresponsibility toward “our” consumers
and blithe ignorance of the consequences of their work, properties
that effectively reinforce their unfitness for American citizenship. This
is a moral standard that has already been increasingly imposed on the
working class by legal and social expressions of U.S. neoliberalism.
Chinese lead panics are sticky; they are generated by, and further
borrow from, many already interlaced narratives. The spread of war
discourse within the West and of the imaginary fount of bioterrorist
plotting, dramatized by the U.S. government in its second Gulf war,
was a convenient additive to narrations about toxins.23 Bioterrorism
involves the intentional use of toxic agents that are biologically active,
even if not “live” themselves, against populations. They often cannot
be perceived by the naked eye. While bioterrorist intentionality can-
not be attached to the lead narrative (the China case might more aptly
be called “bioterrorist negligence”), it is nevertheless fairly easy to
read the discourses on lead as a biosecurity threat, conflating the safety
of individual bodies with the safety of national concerns.24 Other
biosecurity threats have also been recruited as “Asian,” in the case of
contagious diseases such as sars and bird flu. Consultants and safety
advocates deemed red and yellow colors—precisely those colors used
to indicate heightened levels of “security threat” in U.S. airports—to

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have particularly dangerous levels of lead and suggested color as an

effective criterion (“profile”) by which toys should be identified and
returned.25
Thus, lead was an invisible threat whose material loci and physi-
cal provenance, much like a terrorist “sleeper cell,” needed to be pre-
sumed in advance and mapped—not only geographically but senso-
rily, sometimes through visual coding schemes like color itself (recall
the Abotex lead test color chart which codes faint yellow the least
toxic, black the most).26 Popular responses both in the United States
and in other countries affected by the China toy recall bore this out;
one blog entry’s title, for instance, was the indignant “Why Is China
Poisoning Our Babies?”27 News about heparin contamination in phar-
maceuticals originating from China became particularly explosive
when it was thought to be deliberate, highlighting the sense of in-
sidious invasion in the same way that bioterrorism does.28 Given the
apparent, blithe disregard or dysfunction of both the Chinese and U.S.
governmental safety controls along the way, the sign of biosecurity
and protection falls on the head of a young child who wishes to play
with a toy, and by implication, that child’s parents. Indeed, the body
of the young white child using a toy train is not signified innocently
of its larger symbolic value at the level of the nation; its specific popu-
larity suggests this metonymic connection.
The last few decades have seen a strengthening of affects around ter-
rorism, associating it with radical extranationality as well as nonstate
agentivity. Jasbir Puar has incisively examined the escalating agitation
around purported “terrorism,” particularly its potential to consolidate
national interests (including white and neoliberal homonationalisms)
in the face of such a perceived threat.29 Indeed, nonstatehood, while
always potentially unstable, has come into a mature relationship with
the imagined possibility of terrorism. This is evidenced, for example, by
the fact that in 2010, Senator Joe Lieberman proposed that Congress
enact the revocation of citizenship from those who demonstrate fi-
nancial support or other forms of allegiance to organizations deemed
“terrorist” by the United States. Under these conditions, the invisible
threat of cognitive and social degradation in the case of lead meant
that the abiding, relatively more methodical, and diversified work of
environmental justice activists on lead toxicity was here transformed
into something that looked less “environmental” and increasingly like
another figure in the war on terror, a war that marked the diffuseness,

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

unpredictability, and sleeper-­cell provenance of enemy material and

its biological vectors.30
This “war on terror” was doubly pitched as a neomissionary insis-
tence on the dissemination of the “American way,” including its habits
of free choice and its access to a free market at its core defined by
the proliferation of consumer products. Thus, the very title of a New
York Times article by Leslie Wayne published in 2009 about corrosive
drywall for new homebuilding sourced from China, “The Enemy at
Home,” betrays toxic drywall’s coding as a biological threat metaphor-
ized as war (itself not at great notional distance from “biological war-
fare”).31 The idea of this “enemy at home” makes lead into a symptom-
atic signifier of a war of capital flows, particularly the struggle over
trade protectionism and the Chinese resistance to allow the Chinese
yuan to float against the dollar, a resistance that has only recently seen
a measured lessening as of this date of writing (2011). Lead is ani-
mated to become simultaneously an instrument of heightened do-
mestic panic, drawing from and recycling languages of “terror,” and a
rhetorical weapon in the rehearsal of the economic sovereignty of the
United States. A story by the financial-­interest magazine Forbes at the
height of the toy recall made these slippages baldly evident: “Chinese
Toy Terror.”32
What are blended in this collapse of narratives, and what are of par-
ticular interest here for animacy, are precisely the subjects and objects,
recipients and perpetrators, terrorists and innocents, of lead toxicity.
In other words, the fused stories about lead displace the normal agents
of the contagion narratives and scramble the normal pairings between
protector and protected and self and other. As such, they cannot rhe-
torically function as effectively as they might strive to function. This
easily recognizable failure of boundaries may be the sole rehabilitative
counterthrust of the new lead panic.

Lead’s Labors
The image of the vulnerable white child is relentlessly promoted over
and against an enduring and blatant background (that is, unacknowl-
edged) condition of labor and of racism: the ongoing exposure of im-
migrants and people of color to risk that sets them up for conditions
of bodily work and residence that dramatize the body burdens that
projects of white nationalism can hardly refuse to perceive. Blithely

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overlooked—or steadfastly ignored—are the toxic conditions of labor

and of manufacture, such as inattention to harmful transnational labor
and industrial practices that poison, in many cases, badly protected or
unprotected workers.33 Other persistent conditions include the invisi-
bility within the United States of the working, destitute, or agrarian
poor in favor of idealized consumers who are white and middle or
upper middle class; electronic wastes as extravagant and unattended
exports of the United States to countries willing to take the cash to
mine it; the dumping of toxic wastes and high-­polluting industries
into poorer neighborhoods within municipalities; and common prac-
tices in the United States of exporting products of greater toxicity
than is permitted within its own borders.34 Here, the cynical calculus
of risk, race, and international trade continually reproduces a specific
configuration of toxic expulsion to othered lands or peoples. As Cheri
Lucas Jennings and Bruce H. Jennings report, the international eco-
nomic director of the World Bank suggested that third-­world coun-
tries might be better off trading for the toxic waste of first-­world
countries, since “poverty or imminent starvation” were a greater
threat to life expectancy than the toxicity of the waste they would
receive.35 Within the United States, these authors point to the greater
access to less persistent toxins (such as pesticides) by those with eco-
nomic privilege, leading to a bifurcated distribution of greater and
lesser toxic infusion along lines of both class and race.
The contemporary fears in the United States about lead contami-
nation and mental degradation are complexly interwoven with race,
class, and cognitive ability, both as they externally manifest (that is,
the racialization of imports from China) and as they dovetail with
internal registers of classism and regional stereotyping. Take, for ex-
ample, one toy, Hillbilly Teeth, made in China and distributed by the
company Funtastic (of Houston, Texas), which was recalled due to
concerns about lead in 2008 (figure 16). The recall notice of this prod-
uct issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission singled
out the gray paint on the teeth as the source of lead.36 Though it was
coded as threatening or harmful due to its potentially tainted plastic
(which would by design be placed in the child’s mouth), one could
equally find alarm in its perpetration of classed, ableist, and ruralized
violence in its identity as a toy.
The package’s cardboard backing depicts a smiling, presumably
“nonhillbilly” white male child wearing the denture insert, and the

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

16. Funtastic’s “Let’s Get Goofy” Hillbilly

Teeth, made in China, recalled in 2008.
Source unknown.

discolored, out of proportion, and otherwise imperfect teeth are des-

ignated “yucky,” “gross,” and “scary.” An inset fake frame, labeled “My
Name’s Bubba,” has a cartoon speech bubble (“Yain’t I purdy?”) that
uses a distorted caricature of rural or Southern accents. The prefatory
and framing “Let’s Get Goofy!” resembles the youthful refrain “Let’s
Get Retarded!” and signifies a willful and temporary loss of rationality
and cognitive measure. The extant class coding of the “bad teeth” fur-
ther builds on the myth of rural and working-­class degradation by
hinting at the acute dental issues that often accompany addiction to
methamphetamines (aka “meth mouth”). Methamphetamines are the
most recognized drug problem in “hillbilly country,” that is, the rural
South and Midwest. The juxtaposition of Hillbilly and Teeth reminds
us that both the urban gentrified center and the pastoral myths of
the United States have their own white undersides.37 Against such a
consolidated scenario, the leaden gray-­tinted tooth paint seems even
more intent on the protection of a limited few, the urban kids who

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have the voluntary luxury, every year on Halloween, of assuming the

mask of fallen class and intellectual ability, only to snap it off later.
A different toy, however, sat at the center of the lead panic in 2007:
the expensive toy series Thomas the Tank Engine, seen earlier. Thomas
and his “friends” are immensely popular objects and are accompanied
by a range of lucrative tie-­ins, including a television show, games, ac-
tivity books, candy, and other merchandise bearing Thomas’s char-
acteristic blue “body” and round gray and black face. These are not
only meant for children. The series is marketed to middle-­class par-
ents who insist on high-­status “quality” products, which in this case
are tuned toward boys and quite explicitly direct their proper mascu-
line development. An article from the New York Times in 2007 explic-
itly associated the toys’ high prices with their presumed quality and
safety. The article bears one visual image, a photograph of the “James
Engine” from the Thomas series, and a description of one member
of the vulnerable population (identified as children), a white four-­
year-­old boy whose mother points to the expectation of “quality”
for these toys and whose class membership appears to be middle to
upper middle class: “The affected Thomas toys were manufactured in
China. . . . ‘These are not cheap, plastic McDonald’s toys,’ said Marian
Goldstein of Maplewood, N.J., who spent more than $1,000 on her
son’s Thomas collection, for toys that can cost $10 to $70 apiece. ‘But
these are what is supposed to be a high-­quality children’s toy.’”38 Pre-
sumably, the “cheap,” working-class McDonald’s toys are the toxic
ground on which the nontoxic quality toys are to be built and com-
pared.
Goldstein may have a point about the train’s symbolic privilege, at
least. Trains occupy an iconic place in the mythology and economic
actuality of the creation of the American West. Symbolically and ma-
terially, trains are intrinsically connected to commerce and the circu-
lation of economic goods as well as, in the United States, to a hidden
history of Chinese labor. Both the extension of railroad systems to the
American West and the development of the Sacramento River Delta
in California heavily depended on imported Chinese labor that was
rendered invisible in certain interested histories of labor.39 Narratives
about lead toxicity in toys from China largely obscure the conditions
of Chinese labor in the production of these toy trains.40 Nevertheless,
these narratives deploy the fact of labor obliquely, in an explication
of the pathway of toxicity (lead must be painted on). How to explain
this incipient visibility?

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

An accusatory narrative in which Chinese are the criminal painters

of the toy Thomas trains sets things up differently from the story
of the Chinese laborers who extended the railroads to the Ameri-
can West: while the latter were made invisible in the interest of the
white ownership of land, property, and history, for the toy painters
the conditions of labor needed to be made just visible enough to
facilitate the territorial, state, and racial assignation of blame, but not
enough to generally extend the ring of sympathetic concern around
the workers themselves.41 Indeed, I found very few instances among
concerned parents or journalists in the United States in which lead
was also understood to be a source of toxicity for the immigrant or
transnational laboring subjects who take part in the manufacture of
the product.
So, the story of lead, a story of toxicity, security, and nationality, is
also necessarily about labor: when it is registered, and when it is hid-
den, and who pays what kind of attention to whose labor. The regu-
lar erasure, or continued invisibility, in the lead narratives of the tex-
tile sweatshops, device assemblers, and toy painters, who are largely
young women who have migrated into the Chinese cities from rural
satellites, renders quite ironic the care work that is so poignantly pro-
vided by the toys—and transitively by the women who make them.
The transitive criminalization of Chinese toy assemblers is all the
more ironic when we consider the routinization of childcare inside
the United States by African Americans and immigrants from Cen-
tral and South America, the Philippines, South Asia, the Caribbean,
and elsewhere, for middle-­class parents of all ethnicities.42 In some
respects, the economy itself and changing kinship structures have in-
creasingly meant that parents hire help while they work away from
home, a creep of the care crisis into higher echelons of society, as
feminist labor scholar Evelyn Nakano Glenn notes.43 From the 1980s,
middle-­class mothers increasingly joined the labor force as neoliber-
alism took hold in the racialized sphere of the care of children: as they
increasingly left the house and their children, “mothers had to accom-
plish more intimate care in less time,” suggesting that care work be
taken up by others in their place.44 The racial mapping of the desirable
subjects in the United States thus occurs in the context of the erasure
of its disposable ones; I refer here to Grace Chang’s notion of (immi-
grant female) “disposable domestics.”45
Just as lead particles travel, so too does Thomas the train. It is a mo-
bile vehicle, not only symbolically but also materially, one that has

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journeyed from England to the United States to China and back again.
And indeed, a trip I took to China in 2010 revealed many knock-
offs of Thomas, who is just as popular there as he is in the United
States. These packaged toys, puzzle books, and candies were immedi-
ately recognizable but had slightly incorrect English spellings of his
name, such as “Tromas,” or “Tomas” (figure 17), as if to match the
impossibility of perfect translation. These “illegal” copies show that,
like the lead he allegedly carries with him on his back, Thomas is not
containable within a given trajectory of movement and desire. The
global spread of this commodity complicates the one-­way vector of
contamination from China to the United States, indicating a multi-
directional flow. And yet, little is still known within the United States
about how these toys may or may not harm Chinese children or the
Chinese workers who produce them.
I referred earlier to a mode of transmission—from contaminated
toy to child—as one of transitivity. For the late-­capitalist, high-­
consumption, and highly networked sectors of the world, transitivity
has arguably become a default mode not only of representation but
of world-­relating. The asymmetry of this world-­relation is no barrier
to the toxic effectivity of simmering racial panics. The sphere of the
world that is well rehearsed in the flow of transnational commodities,
services, and communications has become the perfect “host” for such
transitivity, or at least the collapsing of transitive relations into con-
ceptualizations of immediate contact. Patricia Clough, in her theori-
zation of the complex, even nonhuman, agencies and affects partici-
pating in television and computer-­consuming information societies,
aptly writes that “even as the transnational or the global become
visible, proposing themselves as far-­flung extensions of social struc-
ture, they are ungrounded by that upon which they depend: the speed
of the exchange of information, capital, bodies, and abstract knowl-
edge and the vulnerability of exposure to media event-­ness.”46
An advertisement on the airport trolleys in Shanghai Pudong Air-
port (figure 18) in June 2010 demonstrates this relentlessly produc-
tive metonymic and economic transitivity. The text reads, “Your Eyes
in the Factory! Book and Manage your Quality Control on www
.AsiaInspection.com,” in stark white letters on a red background;
below the website name is an icon of inspection, the magnifying glass.
In an inset picture, a male worker—possibly an inspector, possibly an
assembler—handles a product. The transitivity here is not between
the Chinese workers and the toys they have assembled, but rather

178
17. Super Tomas Series toy train set, outdoor market, Guilin, China, 2010.
At lower right, the first three Chinese characters are to-­ma-­sz, a phonetic
spelling of Thomas. Photograph by the author.
 Chapter Five

18. Airport trolley ad for AsiaInspection.

Photograph by the author, June 26, 2010.

of participants in production monitoring. It exists between the eyes

of international corporate managers, the advertisement’s English-­
reading addressees, and another set of eyes that is ambiguously either
that of local Chinese inspectors or that of remote cameras that focus
on Chinese workers. The ad further represents the interest in surveil-
lance, glossed here as more benign “quality control,” that arose after
the toxicity of Chinese products illuminated Chinese production as a
troubled site.47

Blackened Lead
Some years ago, as I indicated earlier, before the domestic narrative
largely disappeared in favor of the Chinese one, the greater public was
invited to consider the vulnerability of black children to lead intoxi-
cation. What happened to this association? Did it simply disappear,
as I first hinted? Or did it meaningfully recede? I turn here to take a
closer look at the medicalization of lead. Lead toxicity is medically
characterized as at least partly neural; that is, it involves the nerve sys-
tem, most notably comprising the brain and nerve pathways through-
out the body. Medical accounts of lead toxicity, including those in-

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

voked in the toy lead panic of 2007, invoke its ability to lower the
intelligence quotient (iq) of a child. The iq measure bears a distinctly
eugenicist history and remains the subject of controversy regarding
whether it has adequately shed its originary racial and socioeconomic
biases.48 Indeed, to what extent might we imagine that lead-­induced
iq loss not only threatens the promise of success in an information
economy, but also involves subtle racial movement away from white-
ness, where the greatest horror is not death but disablement, that is,
mental alteration and the loss of rational control?
Julian B. Carter’s study of neurasthenia, or “nervous exhaustion,” and
its characterization in the 1880s by the neurologist George Beard as a
specific property of genteel, sensitive, intelligent, well-­bred whiteness
(rather than, it was assumed, as a property of the working or peas-
ant classes) gives us a more specific backdrop against which to con-
sider neurotoxicity and its connection to the new lead’s poster boy,
the white middle-­class child. Carter argues that the very vulnerability
expressed by neurasthenia as a property cultivated primarily in privi-
leged whites, both men and women, is what legitimated their claim to
power in modernity, even as industrialization was blamed as a cause of
the condition.49
Within the United States, “blackness” has its own specific history
with regard to rhetorics of contamination, not least the “one drop of
blood” policies against racial mixing and miscegenation. Later poli-
cies of racial segregation in the Jim Crow South were also linked to
white fears of contamination. Referring to the debates in Plessy v. Fer-
guson, Saidiya Hartman writes of white concerns about the “integrity
of bodily boundaries and racial self-­certainty.” She notes, “As Plessy
evinced, sitting next to a black person on a train, sleeping in a hotel
bed formerly used by a black patron, or dining with a black party
seated at a nearby table not only diminished white enjoyment but also
incited fears of engulfment and contamination.”50
Lead contamination in the United States continues to be scrutinized
for its racial bias, albeit unevenly. One recent contested conjunction
of African American populations and lead was a study led by the Ken-
nedy Krieger Institute. This study, conducted between 1993 and 1995,
tracked lead levels in the children of Baltimore public housing oc-
cupants (primarily African Americans) who were exposed to various
degrees of lead toxicity in residential paint, without adequate warn-
ing of the dangers of that lead. A storm of debate erupted around

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this study, in which healthy families were recruited to live in lead-­

contaminated houses. (This experiment harked back to the notorious
Tuskegee Institute study, conducted between 1932 and 1972, which
monitored poor black men who had syphilis but neither treated nor
informed them in any way about the disease.)51
I have claimed that the year 2007 represented a year of transition, as
a new and imaginatively more dominant, exogenous Chinese lead was
entering the public domain. In this very same year, National Public
Radio symptomatically both remembered and forgot received knowl-
edge about domestic lead toxicity. First, a National Public Radio (npr)
show called “Living on Earth” updated its coverage of a longitudinal
study on the urban poor and lead toxicity. That same year, another npr
show noted the higher levels of lead toxicity among African Ameri-
can children and pronounced these statistics “puzzling,” leaving it at
that.52 “Puzzling”: this illogic or failure of deduction occurred despite
all kinds of widely available evidence pointing to increased urban re-
gional pollution, lower access to information, and lower financial ca-
pacity to remediate or conceal lead paint. This easy disregard explains
how black children in representations of toxic lead largely disappear
and are replaced by white children: the national security project of the
United States is less interested in profiling African American children
as victims of lead poisoning, especially when the “new” lead is now
situated as an externally derived attack.
Even the “remembering” of urban toxicity in the npr “Living on
Earth” show in 2007 is of a certain kind. This show updated its audi-
ence on an acclaimed longitudinal study on lead’s effects on children
that was begun in the 1970s, led by Kim Dietrich of the University
of Cincinnati, and revisited over the years by npr. Dietrich reported
that early exposure to lead toxicity can be linked to later criminal
behavior. By design, the study was focused on “inner-­city” children,
according to Dietrich, “who are largely minority.”53 In the npr up-
date in 2007, which functions as a symptomatic piling-­up of racial
constructs, Dietrich actively legitimated the interviewer’s prompts,
gathering a stunning assemblage: poverty, proximity of weapons, vio-
lence, lead, and poor nutrition together as collective determining fac-
tors for inner-­city criminality:
Gellerman (interviewer): So if you look at inner cities, if you look
at the poor, if you look at their exposure to weapons, you look at
their exposure to violence, you look at their exposure to lead, and

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

their poor nutrition. Is this sort of the perfect combination of fac-

tors for crime?
Dietrich: Yes, it’s in a sense, the perfect storm. Uh, the environment
provides a lot of incentives for crime. The child is in a community
where he or she sees violence—the availability of guns, the avail-
ability of illicit drugs. So I would say that the inner-­city environ-
ment provides the weapon, lead pulls the trigger.
“Lead pulls the trigger.” This metaphor of weaponry is used to charac-
terize a latent violent criminality domestic to the United States, natu-
ralized to an urban underclass of color, using a co-­construction of
guns, “ghettoes,” and racialized pathology. In some sense, it is an old
story: to pump someone full of lead is to kill them. But the form
and objects of death have become molecular, and intentionality has
shifted to neglect, and a fragile self-­identification rather than potency
reshapes the threat into the other person, conflated with the lead that
afflicts them.
Contrast this metaphor of weaponry to the title of the New York
Times article on toxic Chinese drywall, “The Enemy at Home,” which
partakes of a war metaphor not because of some naturalizing co-­
construction of guns, “ghetto,” and racialized pathology, but in re-
lation to a transnational (that is, extra-­domestic) exchange that simul-
taneously seems to threaten representative individual bodies and
criminalize Chinese trade participation. This enemy, that is, should
not be at “home,” with this word understood both as a generalized
national body and as the domicile of family units (who are in a posi-
tion to afford the construction of new homes).
One wonders to what degree any newfound alarmism about the
vulnerability of black children to environmental lead can succeed,
given the abiding construction of affinities between racist construc-
tions of blackness and those of lead, long integral to the American
racial and gendered corporeal imaginary.54 A racial construction of
blacks as already unruly, violent, contaminated, and mentally defi-
cient lies inherent in the current neoliberal economy, which not only
positions people of color in a labor hierarchy that matches them with
literally disabling forms of manual labor, but is also conditioned and
supported by a growing and incredibly powerful prison industrial
complex structured according to race, class, and gender.55 If lead ex-
posure itself is associated with cognitive delay, enhanced aggressivity,
impulsivity, convulsions, and mental lethargy, then we might read

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such characterizations of blackness as attributions, or intimations, of

disability, as much as we already understand them as damaging racial
profiles. Eric Lott’s study of blackface minstrelsy relates the sutur-
ing of impulsivity or sudden bodily displacement to fears about black
masculinity in this performance culture in the United States. Lott
reads Charles Dickens’s account of the dancing in a New York black-
face performance as stunned by its spasticity: “the whole passage reads
as if Dickens did not really know what to do with such energy, where
to put it.”56 Would lead toxicity, hence overdetermined with legacies
of the negative characteristics of blackness, succeed quite so success-
fully as an imagined property of other racialized bodies, such as the
Mexican braceros of the Second World War and modern-­day maqui-
ladora workers, both of whom have suffered from lead toxicity?57 If
disability can be read into constructs of blackness, disability itself is
also a critically important axis of difference. Scholars such as Nir-
mala Erevelles and Andrea Minear point out the dangers of being both
black and disabled; the authors suggest that within critical race femi-
nism, while disability is sometimes recognized, it can often analyti-
cally function for scholars as a “nuance” of intensity rather than its
own structural difference, leading to a loss of complexity in the read-
ing: “the omission of disability as a critical category in discussions of
intersectionality has disastrous and sometimes deadly consequences
for disabled people of color caught at the interstices of multiple dif-
ferences.” These are just some ways in which criminality, race, and dis-
ability can be mutually produced and reproduced.
Thus, it is not necessarily correct to judge that African American
youth are now no longer viewed as vulnerable to lead. Rather, it is
easier to imagine that in this pointedly transnational struggle between
major economic powers, black children are now the less-­urgent popu-
lation under threat. It is, instead, as if black children are constructed as
more proximate to lead itself, as naturalized to lead; they serve as new
ground to the newest figure.
In the case of the Thomas trains, lead toxicity is racialized, not only
because the threatened future has the color of a white boy, but also
because that boy must not change color. The boy can change color in
two ways: First, lead lurks as a dirty toxin, as a pollutant, and it is per-
sistently racialized as anything but white. Second, black children are
assumed to be toxic; and lead’s threat to white children is not only that
they risk becoming dull and cognitively defective, but precisely that

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

they lose their class-­elaborated white racial cerebrality, and that they
become suited racially to living in the ghettoes.58

Queer Licking
Let me return to the visual symbolic of media coverage of lead tox-
icity. The florid palette of toy-­panic images yielded two prominent
and repeating icons. The media representations favored a pairing of
images: on the one hand, the vulnerable child, more frequently a
young, white, middle-­class boy; and on the other hand, the danger-
ous party: Thomas the Tank Engine. The iconic white boy’s lead tox-
icity must be avoided: he should not be mentally deficient, delayed,
or lethargic. His intellectual capabilities must be assured to consoli-
date a futurity of heteronormative (white) masculinity; that is to say,
he must not be queer. This is not only because one of lead’s toxici-
ties reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is
reproductive disability and infertility; I suggest here that one aspect
of the threat of lead toxicity is its origin in a forbidden sexuality, for
the frightening originary scene of intoxication is one of a queer lick-
ing. Here again is the example of the white boy, who in the threaten-
ing and frightening scene is precisely licking the painted train, a train
whose name is Thomas, a train that is also one of the West’s preemi-
nent Freudian phallic icons.59 This image of a boy licking the train,
though clearly the feared scene of contamination, never appears lit-
erally, or least I have not found it appearing literally; rather, if a boy
and a train are present, the boy and the train are depicted proximately,
and that is enough to represent the threat (the licking boy would be
too much, would too directly represent the forbidden). But sugges-
tions are sometimes loaded onto the proximities. In one representa-
tive image from a website alerting its readers to rc2’s recall of Thomas
the Tank Engine trains, we see the head and chest of a blond boy lying
alongside a train that is in the foreground. The boy’s moist lips are
parted and smiling, his eyes intent and alert; he grasps a dark-­hued
train car with his right hand, gazing slightly upward at it. The other
cars, receding toward the camera, fall out of focus. The scene is—at
the very least—physically and emotionally intimate, pleasurable, and
desirous.60
On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
issued a fact sheet about lead, including the following statement under

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the heading “how your child may be exposed”: “Lead is invisible to

the naked eye and has no smell. Children may be exposed to it from
consumer products through normal hand-­to-­mouth activity, which
is part of their normal development. They often place toys, fingers,
and other objects in their mouth, exposing themselves to lead paint or
dust.”61 The language here, which means to reassure anxious parents,
twice uses the word normal in describing children’s orality: their hand-
to-mouth activity is “normal . . . part of their normal development.”
This redundancy betrays a nervousness about children, with its lan-
guage of proper development and its delineation of what is or is not
permissible in normal play.
Returning to that fantasy that images could only approximate: what
precisely is wrong with the boy licking the train? Two things are
wrong: one, the boy licking Thomas the Tank Engine is playing im-
properly with the phallic toy, not thrusting it forward along the floor,
but putting it into his mouth. Such late-­exhibited orality bears the
sheen of that “retarded” stage of development known as homosexu-
ality. I am invoking the impossible juncture between the queernesses
“naturally” afforded to children and the fear of a truly queer child.62 I
recently had a conversation with a British man in his seventies about
the lead panic within the United States. With a twinkle in his eye, he
said, “We had that lead in toys when I was young! Perhaps we just
didn’t suck them?” To me, his comment highlights the kind of tem-
poral limitations on some kinds of national memory, the invested for-
getting that is necessary for such a lead panic to become so enlivened.
Given that lead’s very threat is that it produces cognitive disabilities,
the scene of the child licking his toxic train slides further into queer-
ness, as queer and disabled bodies alike trouble the capitalist marriage
of domesticity, heterosexuality, and ability. The queer disability theo-
rist Robert McRuer writes of the development of domesticity within
capitalism that the “ideological reconsolidation of the home as a site
of intimacy and heterosexuality was also the reconsolidation of the
home as a site for the development of able-­bodied identities, practices,
and relations.”63 Exhibiting telltale signs of homosexuality and lead
toxicity alike is simultaneously to alert a protected, domestic sphere
to the threat of disability. One could say that lead itself is queered here
as a microcosmic pollutant that, almost of its own accord, invades the
body through plenitudes of microcosmic holes (a child’s skin), sites
the state cannot afford to acknowledge, for the queer vulnerabilities
they portend.

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 Lead’s Racial Matters

Animacy theory embraces the ramified sites and traces of shifting

being. It claims first that the tropes by which lead threatens to con-
taminate “healthy” privileged subjects relies fundamentally on ani-
macy hierarchies. Lead can drag vulnerable people down, through
variously “lesser” positions of animateness, into the realms of the
“vegetable” or the nonsentient. At the same time, it has already
weighed on some bodies more than others. The strength of anxieties
about lead toxicity microcosmically, and very compactly, demon-
strates that race, class, sexuality, and ability are unstable. These are not
assured categories or properties that could operate intersectionally in
a binary analysis, but are rather variably “mattering participants” in
dominant ontologies that cannot therefore securely or finally attach
to any body. Animacy theory objectifies animate hierarchies, assessing
their diverse truth effects against the mobilities and slippages that too
easily occur within them, and asks what paths the slippages trace. The
next chapter focuses on the peculiar affective mediations wrought by
toxicity, expanding beyond the paranoid images of altered bodies and
minds produced by the fearful ensembles of U.S. biosecurity that are
recounted in this chapter.
Notwithstanding my claims about lead’s racialization in relation to a
Chinese context, lead is of course not always specific to China. Rather,
like any toxin, perhaps especially because it is not alive, it can be de-
tached and reattached to diverse cultural and biological forms. This
means that it is readily racialized, but with a set of preferences pro-
vided by the discursive structures it inhabits. Lead as a toxin, more
generally, has already become in this global context racialized in ex-
cess as nonwhite; for instance, Mexican lead-­tinged candy also re-
ceived much media attention in 2007.64 Yet lead’s attachment prefer-
ences are perhaps not so flighty as one might first think; the “yellow
hue” of today’s lead seems to swirl in with the “brown” and “black”
layers of lead’s naturalized image.
I have suggested here that the mediation of lead in and around
categories of “life” in turn undoes lead’s deadness by reanimating it.
In other words, lead has the capacity to poison definitively animate
beings, and as such achieves its own animacy as an agent of harm.
By examining the signifying economies of health, imperialism, and
degradation that paint race onto different bodies, and by directing
attention to the multiplicity of “contact zones” of those engaging
lead—from working on the assembly line, to using the new products
that contain them, to the downstream use of the products, to the re-

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cycling and mining of them—we witness the inherent brokenness of

“races,” “geographics,” and “bodies” as systems of segregation, even as
they remain numbingly effective in informing discourses of combat,
health, and privilege. An environmental history of toxic objects must
minimally register the gendered, laboring, and chronically toxically
exposed bodies of globalized capital, which systematically bear less
frequent mention in narratives of toxicity than the cautionary warn-
ings from the seat of U.S. empire. With this registration, lead’s spec-
tacle remains connected to the possible forging of justice.

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 6
Following Mercurial Affect

Toxins are everywhere. The story goes they weren’t here before. They
lurk in personal products, our industry-­spewn air, our soil, our food,
below houses, and in waste receptacles where they will not degrade
for years. They reside inside our bodies. They are blamed for disabili-
ties and death, including autism, asthma, chronic illness, cancer. In
the attention to worldwide pollution, human bodies and ecosystems
alike have entered its broad arc of toxic destruction. Though Law-
rence Buell in 1998 identified the early period of contemporary “toxic
discourse” in the United States with the emergence of Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring in 1962, notions and discursive sites of toxicity seem to
have blossomed and transmogrified somewhat beyond Buell’s astute
literary mapping of the rhetorical underpinnings of toxic discourse:
rude awakenings, nostalgic yearnings for pastoral purity.1 Recent years
have witnessed a tremendous growth of knowledge productions re-
lating to the toxic ecology of the human body, which is linked to an
industry of toxin-­testing private and nonprofit agencies that hope to
manage safety dangers regarding threats to home and body. These are
accompanied by stories about the toxic load that people in various
geographies at various life stages carry.2 Coverage of toxic catastro-
phes compulsively refers to other such events.
The previous chapter on lead attended to medicalized representa-
tions of lead toxicity and their collusion with discourses about race
and human development. While the discussion of lead introduced the
figure of lead toxicity as a measure of public fear, this chapter focuses
 Chapter Six

squarely on toxicity itself, in both its cultural structures and its affects,
this time with attention to mercury and the “mercurial.”
Here I move from exploring toxicity’s contemporary pervasive-
ness as a notion, to exploring its purported and experienced mecha-
nisms in the human body. This shift concerns the role of metaphor
in biopolitics, since the seemingly metaphorical productions of cul-
tural expressions of toxicity are not necessarily more concrete than
the literal ones, which are themselves composed of complex cultures
of immunity thinking. Reflecting on the ambiguous subject-­object
relations of toxicity, I use animacy theory to ask how the flexible sub-
jectness or objectness of an actant raises important questions about
the contingencies of humanness and animateness. These contingen-
cies are eminently contestable within critical queer and race and dis-
ability approaches that, for instance, disaggregate verbal patients from
the bottom of the hierarchy. Since, as I argued in chapter 1, animacy
hierarchies are simultaneously ontologies of affect, then such ontolo-
gies might benefit from a reconceptualization of “the order of things,”
particularly along unconventional lines of race, sexuality, and ability.3

Toxicity’s Reach
Toxins have moved well beyond their specific range of biological
attribution, leaking out of nominal and literal bounds. A politician
will decry the “toxic” political atmosphere;4 Britney Spears will sing
“Don’t you know that you’re toxic / And I love what you do”;5 an ad-
vice columnist will caution us to keep a healthy distance from “toxic”
acquaintances.6 One book is written for workers “suffering the ravages
of a toxic personality,” describing what they do as “poison, corrupt,
pollute, and contaminate. . . . We define the toxic personality as any-
one who demonstrates a pattern of counterproductive work behav-
iors that debilitate individuals, teams, and even organizations over the
long term.”7 Thus, toxic people, not just chemicals, are appearing in
popular social discourse, suggesting a shift in national sentiment that
registers an increasing interest in individual bodily, emotional, and
psychic security. For the rhetoric of security inevitably has ramifica-
tions not simply related to health: as the previous chapter delineated,
recent concerns about the toxicity of lead were especially charged in
terms of race, sexuality, ability, and nation.
Let us probe the affective dynamics of one example in detail, the

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 Following Mercurial Affect

paradoxical conceit of the now-­popular phrase “toxic assets,” asso-

ciated with policies of financial deregulation in the United States that
entered a new phase in the early 1990s. Notably, the toxic assets of
significance that originated at that time and that are held responsible
for global economic fallout are the financial products composed of
grouped mortgages tied to a hypervalued and unstable residential real
estate market. We might say that this complex financial product, this
“toxic asset,” is a “good” precisely because it entails capital value; yet it
has unfortunately become—considering the discourse in which “toxic
asset” has meaning—not only “toxic” but also perhaps “untouchable”
(as an affective stance), “unengageable” (as tokens of exchange with
limited commensurability), and perhaps even “disabling” (that is, it
renders the corporation that buys it up also invalid). The term toxic as-
sets thus reflects an effort to externalize—but also to indict for their
threatening closeness (to home)—corrupt layers of financial organi-
zation.
These examples illustrate that there seems to be a basic semantic
schema for toxicity: in this schema, two bodies are proximate; the
first body, living or abstract, is under threat by the second; the sec-
ond has the effect of poisoning, and altering, the first, causing a de-
gree of damage, disability, or even death. In English, this adjectival
meaning of toxic—of or related to poison, which means that a body or
its blood could be harmed by an external agent—has endured since
the 1600s, according to the oed, and it was concretized into the noun
toxin in 1890; it is debatable when the metaphorical use emerged. If
we are willing to assign “literal” to toxicity’s application to the human
body and “metaphoric” to all others, then these metaphorical map-
pings are not always very sound. Linnda Durre, author of Surviving the
Toxic Workplace, identifies certain personalities as toxic; among them is
one she dubs “The Delicate Flower”: “If someone is sitting there con-
stantly saying: ‘You’re wearing perfume. I’m going to have an allergy
attack,’ or: ‘You’re eating meat. That’s so disgusting,’ it’s like grinding,
grinding, whining, whining every day of your life.”8 Durre would
rather expunge the workplace of such complaints; she fails to con-
sider that the design of a workplace might well place certain people,
including those susceptible to allergy attacks, at a radical disadvan-
tage. If the definition of toxin has always been the outcome of political
negotiation and a threshold value on a set of selected tests, its condi-
tionality is no more true in medical discourse than in social discourse,

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in which one’s definition of a toxic irritant coincides with habitual

scapegoats of ableist, sexist, and racist systems. Toxicity’s “first” (under
threat) and “second” (threatening) bodies are thus in the eye of the be-
holder.
Faced with toxicity’s broad and hungry reach, the contemporary
culture of the United States is witnessing both the notional release and
proliferation of the metaphor of toxicity, while also marking its bio-
political entrainment as an instrument of difference. While the first
seems important for allowing a kind of associative theorizing, it is
simultaneously important to retain a fine sensitivity to the vastly dif-
ferent sites in which toxicity involves itself in very different lived ex-
periences (or deaths), for instance, a broker’s relation to “toxic bonds”
versus a farm worker’s relation to pesticides. Furthermore, the de-
ployment of the first can leave untouched—or even depend on—the
naturalized logic of the second. Disability scholars have discussed
the deployment of disability as a trope that ultimately reconsolidates
ability; David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have elucidated the idea
of “narrative prosthesis,” a kind of narrative deployment of disability
that entrenches a kind of ableist idealization of privileged subject posi-
tions.9 Indeed, we might argue that the workplace psychologist Linnda
Durre is doing just that in her formulation of “The Delicate Flower.”
As Michael Davidson reminds us, we cannot consider the prosthesis
only at the level of narrative trope, given the widespread problems
around access to such essential medical devices; he writes, “sometimes
a prosthesis is still a prosthesis.”10 Think about how often culture re-
cruits languages of disability: “the corporation was crippled”; “don’t
use me as a crutch.” The “toxic” people debated in self-­help guides
and pop songs should not be detached from an understanding of how
toxins function in, and impair, actual bodies and systems. Further-
more, such “impairment,” as some scholars and activists assert, should
be understood as a societal production, and not (only or even) as a
problem proper to an individual that must be cured or corrected.

Immunitary Fabric
All cultural productions of toxicity must be rethought as an integral
part of the affective fabric of immunity nationalism. When immunity
nationalism is individuated through biopower, in a culture of respon-
sibility, self-­care, anxious monitoring, and the like, toxicity becomes

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a predictable figure. The apprehension of a toxin relies minimally on

two discourses: “science” and “the body.” Science studies and femi-
nist studies have worked to study and materially reground these two
figures which often stand as both ontologically basal and hence un-
indictable. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler engages the biological
insofar as she asks us to reconsider the discursive pinning of “sex” to
biology and of “gender” to the realm of social and cultural life; but as
she warns us, assigning originary status to “sex” or biology obfuscates
gender’s contribution to (and ontologizing of ) sex; that is, both gen-
der and sex “matter.”11 Rather than displacing the extant materiality
of the body, she focuses on its partially ontologizing figurations. It is
often hard to get a grip on what, precisely, “the body” is supposed to
mean and what we ask it to do, and on how we demand of it so much
symbolically, materially, and theoretically.
Questions of “the body” become particularly complex when taking
into account the various mixings, hybridizations, and impurities that
accompany contemporary bodily forms, from genetically modified
food to the cyborg triumphed by Donna Haraway.12 What, indeed, be-
comes of life now that Haraway’s vision has in some regard prevailed?
Though her “Manifesto for Cyborgs” is over twenty-­five years old, it
has proved eerily prescient in its view of the ever-­seamless integra-
tion of machines, humans, animals, and structures of capital. Human
bodies, those preeminent containers of life, are themselves pervaded
by xenobiotic substances and nanotechnologies. Toxicity becomes
significant now for reasons beyond the pressing environmental haz-
ards that encroach into zones of privilege, beyond late-­transnational
capitalism doing violence to national integrities. Because of debates
around abortion (such as those about when life is technically said to
begin) and around the lifeliness or deathliness of those in “persistent
vegetative states,” not only can we not tell what is alive or dead, but
the diagnostic promise of the categories of life and death is itself in
crisis, not least when thinking through the “necropolitics” that Achille
Mbembe proposes for postcolonial modes of analysis.13 For when bio-
politics builds itself upon “life” or “death” or even Agamben’s “bare
life”14—much like kinship notions that build only upon humans and
hence fail to recognize integral presences of nonhuman animals—it
risks missing its cosubstantiating contingencies in which not only the
dead have died for life, but the inanimate and animate are both subject
to the biopolitical hand.

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Nan Enstad notes that toxicity forces us “to bridge the analytical
polarization of global and local by placing the body in the picture” and
to consider commodities in new ways in the context of global capi-
talism, for instance, “capitalism’s remarkable success at infusing lives
and bodies around the world with its products and by-­products.”15 Yet,
considering the reach of toxicity thinking described earlier, I would
like to expand her fairly concrete take on “the body” (for all the dis-
cursive complication she admits) by suggesting that many bodies are
subject to the toxic—even toxins themselves—and that it is worth ex-
amining the toxicities that seem to trouble more than human bodies.
Indeed, it is one way for us to challenge the conceptual integrity of our
notions of “the body.” For biopolitical governance to remain effective,
there must be porous or even co-­constituting bonds between human
individual bodies and the body of a nation, a state, and even a racial
locus like “whiteness.” This is especially salient within the complex
political, legal, and medical developments of immunity.
For toxicity’s coextant figure is immunity: to be more precise, threat-
ened immunity. Immune systems are themselves constituted by the
intertwinings of scientific, public, and political cultures together.16
Even further, we know that the medicalized notion of immunity was
derived from political brokerages. It is no surprise that discourses on
sickness bleed from medical immunity discourse into nationalist rhe-
toric. Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending details the history of immu-
nity as a legal concept, tracking its eventual adoption into medicine, a
step that eventually enabled people to speak of immune systems with
a singular possessive, as in “my immune system.”17 Cohen’s histori-
cization of immunity gives insight into the breadth of contemporary
expressions of immunity and toxicity, and their many affects in rela-
tion to threat. Analyzing the period after this discursive migration,
Emily Martin’s anthropological study of twentieth-­century immune
systems, Flexible Bodies, details a twentieth-­century shift in contem-
porary thinking about immunity to something private or personal—
“maintained by internal processes”—away from a previous focus on
public hygiene, in which immunity was seen as “related to uncon-
nected factors from the outside.”18 This internalization, even privati-
zation, of immunity helps to explain the particular indignation that
toxicity evokes, since it is understood as an unnaturally external force
that violates (rather than informs) an integral and bounded self. This
is what Cohen calls the “apotheosis of the modern body,” the aban-

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donment of humans’ integral relation to their environments and the

insistence on a radical segregation of self and world fueled by a belli-
cose antagonism.
We can further consider the Italian political philosopher Ricardo
Esposito’s elucidation of the ways in which immunity seems to work
as a kind of destructive “negative protection of life.”19 In Esposito’s
“immunizing paradigm,” immunity is contracted on a “poisoned” af-
fect of gratitude (on the basis of membership in a community) that
undercuts the final possibility of individual immunity. Esposito iden-
tifies the shaky prescription of the introjection of the negative agent
as a way to defend against its exterior identity. Intriguingly, through
“poisoned” affect, or an affect of gratitude that is somehow fatally
compromised, toxicity thus sneaks into Esposito’s elaboration of im-
munity in the realm of affect rather than as a formal object; it is thus
never fully addressed beyond the given questions of negativity in re-
lation to immunity. This may not be surprising, as the history of im-
munity does not confirm that toxicity was there from the start. But if
it was not there, then what was?
It could be productive, I think, to use this theorization of immu-
nity to ask questions of the absence or presence of toxicity (both are
here) as a means of approaching immunity, and particularly to take the
consideration of “poisoned” affect and its compromise to individual
immunity further. I suggest that toxicity incontrovertibly meddles
with the relations of subject and object required for even the kind
of contractual immunitary ordering that Esposito suggests. Thus,
while the threat of toxicity is held to a clear subject-­object relation,
intoxication (of an object by a toxin) is never held to an advantageous
“homeopathic” quantity (in light of the biopolitical interjection of
negativity): indeed, this is the function of poisoned affect seen fully
through. Not only is political immunity challenged, the very nature
of this alteration cannot be fully known. Who is, after all, the subject
here? What if the object, which is itself a subject, has been substan-
tively and subjectively altered by the toxin? Could we tell a history of
intoxication in relation to political immunity that sits next to Espo­
sito’s? There are clearly many more questions than answers here about
the history of the political affect of immunity.

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Toxic Worlding
Recall that matters of life and death have arguably underlain queer
theory from the early 1990s, when radical queer activism in relation to
aids blended saliently with academic theorizing on politics of gender
and sexuality. More recently, Lee Edelman takes up a psychoanalytic
analysis of queerness’s figural deathly assignment in relation to a re-
lentless “reproductive futurism.”20 Jasbir Puar points to life and death
economies that place some queer subjects in the privileged realm of a
biopolitically “optimized life,” while other perverse subjects are con-
signed to the realm of death, as a “result of the successes of queer in-
corporation into the domains of consumer markets and social recogni-
tion in the post–civil rights, late twentieth century.”21 Similar affective
pulses of surging lifeliness or morbid resignation might reflect the
legacy of the deathly impact of aids in queer scholarship. Suggesting
a “horizonal” imagining whose terms are pointedly not foretold by a
pragmatic limitation on the present, José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising
Utopia offers a way around the false promise of a neoliberal, homo-
normative utopia whose major concerns are limited to gay marriage
and gay service in the military: lifely for a few, deathly for others.22
To enact a method that prioritizes a queer reach for toxicity’s
“worlding,” I want to interleave considerations of toxicity and intoxi-
cation with a “toxic sensorium”: a sense memory of objects and affects
that was my felt orientation to the world when I was recently catego-
rized as “ill.” It seems never a simple matter to discuss toxicity, to ob-
jectify it. It is yet another matter to experience something that seems
by one measure or another to be categorized as a toxin, to undergo in-
toxication, intoxification. This difference raises questions about toxic
methodology, which in some way inherits anthropology’s question
about what can be done to respond to crises of objectivity. While no
simple solution exists, it is my interest to attenuate the exceptional-
isms that attain all too easily in, for instance, the previous chapter’s
assessment of lead toxicity’s discursive range: it is possible for a reader
to comfortably reside in a certain sense of integral, nontoxic security
in that analysis.
To intensify toxicity’s intuitive reach, I engage toxicity as a condi-
tion, one that is too complex to imagine as a property of one or an-
other individual or group or something that could itself be so easily
bounded. I would like to deemphasize the borders of the immune

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system and its concomitant attachments to “life” and “death,” such

that the immune system’s aim is to realize and protect life. How can
we think more broadly about synthesis and symbiosis, including toxic
vapors, interspersals, intrinsic mixings, and alterations, favoring inter-
absorption over corporeal exceptionalism? I will not address these
questions from a point of view of mythic health. Rather, I will tell a
tale from the perspective of the existence that I have recently claimed,
one that has been quite accurately considered “toxic.”
In other words, I move now from a theoretical discussion of meta-
phors about threat into what feels, for me personally, like riskier
terrain, the terrain of the autobiographical. As academics are often
trained to avoid writing in anything resembling a confessional mode,
such a turn is fraught with ambivalence. I theorize toxicity as it has
profoundly impacted my own health, my own queerness, and my own
ability to forge bonds, and in so doing, I offer a means to reapproach
questions of animacy with a different lens. This theorization through
the “personal” is not intended as a perfect subjectivity that opposes
an idealized objectivity. Rather, it is meant as a complementary kind
of knowledge production, one that in this context invites both the
sympathetic ingestion (or intoxication) of what remains a marked ex-
perience, and the empathetic memory of past association. It centers
on a set of states and experiences that have been diagnosed as “mul-
tiple chemical sensitivity” and “heavy metal poisoning,” and can be
used to think more deeply about this condition and what it offers to
thinking about bodies and affect. As such, my repository of thoughts,
experiences, and theorizations while ill—ones that queerly and pro-
foundly changed my relationship to intimacy—could be considered a
kind of “archive of feelings,” to use Ann Cvetkovich’s important ter-
minology.23 These are feelings that are neither exclusively traumatic,
nor exclusively private, nor a social archive proper to certain groups:
they are feelings whose publics and intimacies are not clearly bounded
or determinable. Such feelings—and their intimacies—offer a way to
come at normative affect’s margins. Where Lauren Berlant notes, of
less institutionalized interactions, that “intimacy names the enigma of
this range of attachments . . . and it poses a question of scale that links
the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective,”
I mean to destabilize where the toxic and its affects can be located.24
I have for the last few years suffered from the effects of mercury
toxicity, perhaps related to receiving for a decade in my childhood

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weekly allergy shots which were preserved with mercury, and having
a mouth full of “metal” fillings which were composed of mercury
amalgam. That said, I am not invested in tracing or even asserting a
certain cause and effect of my intoxication, not least because such
an endeavor would require its own science studies of Western medi-
cine’s ambivalent materialization of heavy metal intoxication as an
identifiable health concern. Rather, I wish to chart such intoxications
with and against sexuality, as both of these are treated as biologized
and cultural forms with specific ethical politics. In early-­twenty-­first-­
century U.S. culture, queer subjects are in many ways treated as toxic
assets, participating in the flow of capital as a new niche market, yet
also threatening to dismantle marriage or infiltrate the military, and
thus potentially damaging the very economic and moral stability of
the nation. But what happens when queers become intoxicated? Re-
call the earlier secondary Oxford English Dictionary meanings of queer
as both “unwell” and “drunk,” the latter of which is now proclaimed
to be obsolete; such meanings shadow queerness with the cast of both
illness and inebriation. While Muñoz meditates on the possibilities
of ecstasy—the drug—as a metaphor for pleasurable queer tempo-
ralities,25 I explore an intoxication that is not voluntary, is potentially
permanent, is ambivalent toward its own affective uptake, and pro-
duces an altered affect that may not register its own pleasure or nega-
tivity in recognizable terms.
Let me get specific and narrate what my “toxic” cognitive and bodily
state means, how it limits, delimits, frames, and undoes. Today I am
having a day of relative well-­being and am eager to explore my neigh-
borhood on foot; I have forgotten for the moment that I just don’t
go places “on foot,” because the results can be catastrophic. Having
moved to a new place, with the fresh and heady defamiliarization that
comes with uprooting and replanting, my body has forgotten some of
its belabored environmental repertoire, its micronarratives of move-
ment and response, of engagement and return, of provocation and in-
jury. It is for a moment free—in its scriptless version of its future—to
return to former ways of inhabiting space when I was in better health.
Some passenger cars whiz by; instinctively my body retracts and my
corporeal-­sensory vocabulary starts to kick back in. A few pedestri-
ans cross my path, and before they near, I quickly assess whether they
are likely (or might be the “kind of people”) to wear perfumes or
colognes or to be wearing sunscreen. I scan their heads for smoke puffs

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or pursed lips pre-­release; I scan their hands for a long white object,
even a stub. In an instant, quicker than I thought anything could reach
my organs, my liver refuses to process these inhalations and screams
hate, a hate whose intensity each time shocks me.
I am accustomed to this; the glancing scans kick in from habit when-
ever I am witnessing proximate human movement, and I have learned
to prepare to be disappointed. This preparation for disappointment is
something like the preparation for the feeling I would get as a young
person when I looked, however glancingly, into the eyes of a racist
passerby who expressed apparent disgust at my Asian off-­gendered
form. I imagined myself as the queer child who was simultaneously a
walking piece of dirt from Chinatown. For the sake of survival, I now
have a strategy of temporally displaced imaginations; if my future in-
cludes places and people, I pattern-­match them to past experiences
with chemically similar places and chemically similar people. I run
through the script to see if it would result in continuity or disconti-
nuity. This system of simultaneous conditionals and the time-­space
planning that results runs counter to my other practice for survival,
an investment in a refusal of conditions for my existence, a rejection
of a history of racial tuning and internalized vigilance.
To my relief, the pedestrians pass, uneventfully for my body. I real-
ize then that I should have taken my chemical respirator with me.
When I used to walk maskless with unsuspecting acquaintances, they
had no idea that I was privately enacting my own bodily concert of
breath-­holding, speech, and movement; that while concentrating on
the topic of conversation, I was also highly alert to our environment
and still affecting full involvement by limiting movements of my head
while I scanned. Sometimes I had no breath stored and had to scoot
ahead to a clearer zone while explaining hastily “I can’t do the smoke.”
Indeed, the grammatical responsibility is clear here: the apologetic
emphasis is always on I-­statements because there is more shame and
implicature (the implicit demand for my interlocutor to do something
about it) in “the smoke makes me sick,” so I avoid it. Yet the individu-
ated property-­assignation of “I am highly sensitive” furthers the fic-
tion of my dependence as against others’ independence. The question
then becomes which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and
of uninterruptability.
I am, in fact, still seeking ways to effect a smile behind my mask:
lightening my tone, cracking jokes, making small talk about the

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weather, or simply surging forward with whatever energy I have to

connect with a person on loving terms. I did this recently when I had
to go with a mask into Michael’s crafts shop, full as it is of scents and
glues and fiberboard. The register clerk was very sweet, very friendly,
and to my relief did not consider the site of our intersubjectivity to
be the two prominent chemical filter discs on either side of my mask.
“Wearing the mask with love” is the same way I learned to deal with a
rare racial appearance in my white-­dominated hometown in the Mid-
west, or with what is read as a transnationally gendered ambiguity. It
seems the result I receive in return is either love or hostility, and it is
unpredictable. Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask, I am
perceived as a walking symbol of a contagious disease like sars, and
am often met with some form of repulsion; indeed, “sars!” is what
has been used to interpellate me in the streets.
As many thinkers have noted, the insinuation or revelation of
a disability, particularly invisible disability, dovetails interestingly
with issues of coming-­out discourses of sexuality and passing. Both
Ellen Samuels and Robert McRuer have discussed the ways in which
“coming out” as disabled provocatively overlaps with, and also dif-
fers from, “coming out” as queer.26 How does a mask help interrupt
the notion of “passing”? How does it render as “damaged” (or, at least,
vulnerable) a body that might otherwise seem healthy? Not wearing a
chemical mask counts as a guise of passing, of the appearance of non-­
disability: I look “well” when I am maskless in public, at least until I
crumple.
The use of the literal mask as an essential prosthesis for environ-
mentally ill subjects is notable in light of Tobin Siebers’s deployment
of “masquerade” as an exaggeration of disability symbols to manage
or intervene in social schemas about ability and disability.27 This dia-
logic friction between actual mask as facial appurtenance—the mask’s
literal locus on the face—and mask or masquerade as a racial, non-­
disabled, or sexuality metaphor points to the central significance of
face as intersubjective locus, and it exemplifies the expropriability of
a facial notion of embattlement to the rest of the (human) body or
to social spheres of interaction;28 but it also points to the complexi-
ties that emerge when the actual facial signification of disability rubs
up against the facial mask metaphor. Arguably, a chemical mask can
serve as its own masquerade, but it also slips and slides into orthogo-
nal significations. Its reading as exaggeration, in particular, competes

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with its reading as racializing and masculinizing toxic threat, where

the skin of the mask ambivalently locates the threat on either side
of it. The same ambivalence may be attributed to the “skins” of some
toxic bodies, whereas the synecdochal attribution of toxicity applies
either to the (rest of the) toxic body itself (the mask standing for the
human sars vector) or to an exterior, vulnerable body that renders it
so (Fanon’s “skin,” which the “mask” covers, standing in for the colo-
nial racialized visualities that render his blackness toxic to a white col-
lective).29 Is, then, the toxic body the disabled body? Or is the toxic
body that collective body that biopolitically inoculates itself against
a stronger toxin by affording itself homeopathic amounts of a “nega-
tive” toxin (disabled bodies) while remaining in a terrible tension with
these negated entities?
Given my condition, I must constantly renegotiate, and recalibrate,
my embodied experiences of intimacy, altered affect, and the porous-
ness of the body. The nature of metal poisoning, accumulated over de-
cades, is that any and every organ, including my brain, can bear dam-
age. Because symptoms can reflect the toxicity of any organ, they form
a laundry list that includes cognition, proprioception, emotion, agita-
tion, muscle strength, tunnel perception, joint pain, and nocturnality.
Metal-­borne damage to the liver’s detoxification pathways means that
I cannot sustain many everyday toxins: once they enter, they recircu-
late rather than leave. I can sometimes become “autism-­spectrum” in
the sense that I cannot take too much stimulation, including touch,
sound, or direct human engagement, including being unable to meet
someone’s gaze, needing repetitive, spastic movements to feel that my
body is just barely in a tolerable state; and I can radically lose com-
passionate intuition, saying things that I feel are innocuous but are in-
credibly hurtful. The word mercurial means what it means—unstable
and wildly unpredictable—because the mercury toxin has altered a
self, has directly transformed an affective matrix: affect goes faster,
affect goes hostile, goes toxic. Traditional psychology here, I suspect,
can only be an overlay, a reading of what has already transformed the
body; it cannot fully rely on its narratives.
Largely two quarters of the animated agents of the metropolis—
that is, motor vehicles and pedestrians, but not the nonhuman animals
or the insects—can be toxic to me because they are proximate instiga-
tors. The smokestacks, though they set the ambient tone of the envi-
ronment, are of less immediate concern when I am surviving moment

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to moment. Efficiency is far from my aim; that would mean travers-

ing the main streets. Because I must follow the moment-to-moment
changes in quality of air to inhale something that won’t hurt me, turn-
ing toward a thing or away from it correspondingly, humans are to a
radical degree no longer the primary cursors of my physical inhabita-
tion of space. Inanimate things take on a greater, holistic ­importance.
It also means that I am perpetually itinerant, even when I have a goal;
it means I will never walk in a straight line. There are also lessons here,
reminders of interdependency, of softness, of fluidity, of receptivity,
of immunity’s fictivity and attachment’s impermanence; life sustains
even—or especially—in this kind of silence, this kind of pause, this
dis-­ability. The heart pumps blood; the mind, even when it says, “I
can’t think,” has reflected where and how it is. Communion is possible
in spite of, or even because of, this fact.
To conclude this narration of a day navigating my own particular
hazards: I’ve made it back home and lie on the couch, and I won’t be
able to rise. My lover comes home and greets me; I grunt a facsimile
of greeting in return, looking only in her general direction but not
into her eyes. She comes near to offer comfort, putting her hand on
my arm, and I flinch away; I can’t look at her and hardly speak to her;
I can’t recall words when I do. She tolerates this because she under-
stands very deeply how I am toxic. What is this relating? Distance in
the home becomes the condition of these humans living together in
this moment, humans who are geared not toward continuity or pro-
ductivity or reproductivity but to stasis, to waiting, until it passes.
In such a toxic period, anyone or anything that I manage to feel any
kind of connection with, whether it’s my cat or a chair or a friend or
a plant or a stranger or my partner, I think they are, and remember
they are, all the same ontological thing. What happens to notions of
animacy given this lack of distinction between “living” and “lifely”
things? I am shocked when my lover doesn’t remember what I told
“her” about my phone earlier that day, when it was actually a cus-
tomer service representative on a chat page, which once again brings
an animating transitivity into play. And I am shocked when her body
does not reflect that I have snuggled against it earlier, when the snug-
gling and comforting happened in the arms and back of my couch.
What body am I now in the arms of ? Have I performed the inexcus-
able: Have I treated my girlfriend like my couch? Or have I treated my
couch like her, which fares only slightly better in the moral equations?

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Or have I done neither such thing? After I recover, the conflation seems
unbelievable. But it is only in the recovering of my human-­directed
sociality that the couch really becomes an unacceptable partner. This
episode, which occurs again and again, forces me to rethink animacy,
since I have encountered an intimacy that does not differentiate, is not
dependent on a heartbeat. The couch and I are interabsorbent, inter-
porous, and not only because the couch is made of mammalian skin.
These are intimacies that are often ephemeral, and they are lively; and
I wonder whether or how much they are really made of habit.

Animate Objects, Inanimate Subjects

By its very definition, the toxin, as much as it may have been catego-
rized as inanimate, is more than mere matter, for it has a potency that
can directly implicate the vulnerability of a living body. Prototypi-
cally, a toxin requires an object against which its threat operates. This
threatened object is an object whose defenses will be put to the test, in
detection, in “fighting off,” and finally in submission and absorption.
But some confusion occurs when we note that the object of toxicity,
its target, is an animate one—and hence potentially also a kind of sub-
ject—and that the toxin, the subject of toxicity, is inanimate. Think-
ing back to the linguistics of animacy hierarchies detailed in chapter 1,
we note that in this case, various categories of assessment, particularly
of worthiness to serve as agents or patients of verbs, tell opposing
stories. In a schema of toxicity, likely subjects are equally likely ob-
jects, despite their location in very different parts of the animacy hier-
archy. In a scene of human intoxication, for toxins and their human
hosts, the animacy criteria of lifeliness, subjectivity, and humanness
(where the human wins) come up short against mobility and sentience
(where the toxin wins). And this is before even considering what oc-
curs in that moment and the ensuing “life” of intoxication; toxicity
becomes us, we become the toxin. The mercurial, erethic, emotion-
ally labile human moves toward quicksilver, becomes it. There is, in-
deed, something “unworlding” that might be said to take place in the
cultural production of toxic notions. A “normal” world’s order is lost
when, for instance, things that can harm you permanently are not
even visible to the naked eye. Temporal orders become Moebius strips
of identity: How could it do this to me? And yet in that instant, the
“me” that speaks is not the “me” before I was affected by it.

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Recent attention to inanimate objects, from Jennifer Terry’s work

on the love of inanimate objects such as the Eiffel Tower and the Ber-
lin Wall to news coverage of men having serious emotional relation-
ships with their dakimakura pillows, represents certain kinds of rever-
sals of expectation regarding a kind of vitality that objects are afforded
within human worlds.30 Thinking beyond the rubric of fetishism, it is
useful to build upon this work to ask questions of the subjects facing
these objects and to consider how to mark their subjectivity as such
or why we do so. Consider, for instance, the example of my couch,
with which my relationality is made possible only to the degree that
I am not in possession of human sociality. We might indeed let go of
an attachment to the idea that social states or capacities are possessed
by one animate entity and think rather in terms of transobjectivity.31
Transobjectivity releases objectivity from at least some of its episte-
mological strictures and allows us to think in terms of multiple ob-
jects interspersed and in exchange. Stacy Alaimo’s term transcorporeal-
ity suggests we think beyond the terms of the bodily unit and affirm
the agencies of the matter that we live among.32 The sentience of the
couch, in our meeting and communing, then becomes my own sen-
tience as well.
Nikolas Rose, in The Politics of Life Itself, has observed the impact of
recent dramatic changes in the field of biology, particularly in the life-­
making capacities of genetics and the role of pharmaceuticals in vital
self-­management.33 To Rose, these shifts constitute an epistemological
and technical event, and he pronounced that contemporary biopoli-
tics must now be considered molecular in character. This focus on mo-
lecularity is important when thinking about neurotoxicities, which I
consider less a part of the spread of pharmaceutical self-­management
than a sign of the mediations we must now make about toxins be-
tween environmental “givens” (that toxins surround us) and self (that
toxins are us).
In particular, what are the “affectations” or socialities attributed to
toxicity, and what is the “affect” attaining between a toxin and its
host? I consider two different senses of molecularity, one of which
takes the notion of a particle at face value, the other of which leaves
behind a strict biological or physical schema and considers a particle’s
affective involvement on radically different scales. I also want to make
more explicit a relationship between xenophobia and xenobiotics;
xenobiotics are substances understood to be not proper to the human

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body, that is, inherently alien to the body, whether or not they are
recognized as such by it.
Both lead and mercury are chemically classified as metals. They are
often further described as “heavy metals,” a category whose chemical
definition remains contested since “heavy” variously refers to atomic
weight and molecular density. Heavy metal toxins have sites of entry,
pathways of action, and multiple genres of biochemical-­level and
organ-­specific reaction in the body. Lead and mercury are both clas-
sified as neurotoxic, which means that they can damage neurons in the
brain. Sensory impairment correlated to mercury’s neuronal damage,
for instance, can include loss of proprioception, nystagmus (involun-
tary eye movement), and heightened sensitivity to touch or sounds.
But their effectivity is potentially comprehensive: “Like most other
toxic metals, lead and mercury exist as cations, and as such, can react
with most ligands present in living cells. These include such common
ligands as sh, phosphate, amino, and carboxyl. Thus they have the
potential to inhibit enzymes, disrupt cell membranes, damage struc-
tural proteins, and affect the genetic code in nucleic acids. The very
ubiquity of potential targets presents a great challenge to investiga-
tions on mechanisms of action.”34
The ubiquity of potential targets further informs us that the trans-
formation by a toxin and its companions can be so comprehensive that
it renders their host somewhat unrecognizable. Furthermore, to state
perhaps the obvious, research on contemporary toxicities—or indeed,
to broaden our field of inquiry, on historical intoxication—confirms
for us our experiences: that under certain conditions, some of them
enduring or seemingly permanent, social beings can also become radi-
cally altered in their sociality, whether due to brain-­specific damage
or not. They are overcome, overwhelmed, overtaken by other sub-
stances. Although the body’s interior could be described as becoming
“damaged” by toxins, if we were willing to perform the radical act of
releasing the definition of “organism” from its biological pinnings, we
might from a more holistic perspective approach toxicity with a lens
of mutualism.
The biologist Anton de Bary, who developed a theory of symbio-
sis in 1879, defined three types: commensalism, mutualism, and para-
sitism. Thinking of toxins as symbiotes—rather than, for instance,
as parasites which seem only to feed off a generally integral being
without fundamentally altering it (which would perhaps be our first

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guess)—not only captures some toxic affectivity but enables me to

shift modes of approach. Ultimately, amounts—that is, scales—are in-
consequential here; it is affectivity that matters, and the distinction
between parasite and symbiosis is irrelevant. It is worth noting here
that my thinking bears some resemblance to Deleuzian interspersal
and symbiosis. Deleuze and Guattari write substantively about “mo-
lecularity” in relation to becoming-­animal, referring to “particles” as
belonging or not belonging to a molecule in relation to their prox-
imity to one another; but such molecules are defined not by material
qualities but rather more so as entities whose materiality is purpose-
fully suspended.35 Thus, they compare “verbal particles” to “food ali-
mentary” particles that in a schizophrenic’s actions enter into prox-
imity with one another.
Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking is useful in the sense that I attempt
not only to accentuate proximal relations among categorically differ-
entiated entities (across lines of animacy), but equally to emphasize
the insistent segregations of “material” into intensified condensations
(affective intensities) of race, geography, and capital. In this light, the
toxicities tied to heavy metals function as a kind of “assemblage” of
biology, affect, nationality, race, and chemistry. And yet, their analysis
leaves little room for distinctions between “actual” and “abstract,” par-
ticularly in their creative distinction between molecularity and mo-
larity. Thus, I find it useful to hold on to a certain concrete materiality
here, insofar as it offers a potentially critical purchase for thinking
through queer relating and racialized transnational feeling, and fur-
ther because mere metaphors, as we have seen, can sometimes over-
look their own effectivity in literal fields.36

Queering Intimacy
There is a potency and intensity to two animate or inanimate bodies
passing one another, bodies that have an exchange—a potentially
queer exchange—that effectively risks the implantation of injury. The
quality of the exchange may be at the molecular level, airborne mole-
cules entering the breathing apparatus, molecules that may or may
not have violent bodily effects; or the exchange may be visual, the
meeting of eyes unleashing a series of pleasurable or unpleasurable
bodily reactions, chill, pulse rush, adrenaline, heat, fear, tingling skin.
The necessary condition for toxicity to be enlivened—proximity, or

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intimacy—means that queer theories are especially rich for thinking

about the affects of toxicity. At the same time, queer theories can fur-
ther benefit from the lessons of disability theory, particularly by re-
thinking its own others.
Thinking and feeling with toxicity invites us to revise, once again,
the sociality that queer theory has in many ways made possible. As
a relational notion, toxicity speaks productively to queer-­utopian
imagining and helps us revisit the question of how and where subject-­
object dispositions should be attributed to the relational queer figure.
But even further, queer theory is an apt home for the consideration
of toxicity, for I believe the two—queerness and toxicity—have an
affinity. They truck with negativity, marginality, and subject-­object
confusions; they have, arguably, an affective intensity; they challenge
heteronormative understandings of intimacy. Both have gotten under
the skin. Yet queer theory’s attachment to certain human bodies and
other human objects elides from its view the queer socialities that cer-
tain other, nonhuman intimacies portend. What are the exceptional-
isms that can haunt such theorizing?
Let us revisit the scene from the previous chapter of the child who
inappropriately licks his lead-­toxic painted train, the scene that is con-
stantly conjured as one that must be avoided at all costs. The mobility
of ingestible air and the nonemptiness of that air demonstrate that the
act of lead licking is a fantasy of exception. It is not only a fantasy that
not-­licking is a viable way to contain heterosexuality in its bounds,
but it is also a fantasy that not-­licking is a viable way to contain the
interconstitution of people and other people, or people and other ob-
jects. Look closely at your child’s beloved, bright-­red train: you may
choose to expel it from your house, for the toxins that the sight of
it only hints at; but you will pay the cost of his proper entrainment.
What fingers have touched it to make it so? How will you choose
to recover your formerly benign feelings about this train? Love has
somehow to rise above the predetermined grammar of such encoun-
ters, for the grammar itself predicts only negative toxicity.
So how is it that so much of this toxic world, in the form of per-
fumes, cleaning products, body products, plastics, all laden with
chemicals that damage us so sincerely, is encountered by so many of us
as benign or only pleasurable? How is it, even more, that we are doing
this, doing all this, to ourselves? And yet, even as the toxins themselves
spread far and wide, such a “we” is a false unity. There is a relation-

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ship between productivity’s queers (not reproductivity’s queers, that

is) and hidden, normative intoxications.
Those who find themselves on the underside of industrial “develop-
ment” bear a disproportionate risk, as environmentalists and political
economy scholars alike have shown.37 In her article “Akwesasne: Mo-
hawk Mother’s Milk and pcbs,” environmental justice activist Winona
LaDuke describes a multipronged activist project led by the Mohawk
midwife and environmentalist Katsi Cook.38 Cook developed the
“Mother’s Milk” pcb-­monitoring breast milk project, begun in 1984
and ongoing today, in response to the demonstrated toxic levels of
pcbs on the Akwesasne reservation, which straddles the border be-
tween the United States and Canada and is located very close to a pri-
mary emitter of pcbs, a General Motors site established in 1957 which
is now a Superfund site. This proximity—and gm’s improper disposal
practices—meant that both the St. Lawrence River and the Akwesasne
wells, the sources of water on which the Mohawks relied, had toxic
concentrations of pcbs. Indeed, Akwesasne is one of the most highly
polluted Native American reservations.
Cook emphasizes strengthening women’s health so that their critical
role as the “first environment” of babies be taken seriously for exist-
ing and future bodily toxicity. These molecular intimacies—­particles
passed on via breast milk to babies—are implicated in regimes of gen-
dered labor and care. Cook’s activism connects the poisoning of the
turtles to the fate of the Mohawks in a cosmology that reiterates the
shared potency of live turtles and earthly support. Turtles are criti-
cally important in the Mohawk cosmology, which connects them to
the earth itself; LaDuke mentions that North America is called “Turtle
Island,” which comes from a common Native American origin story.
Such a cosmology does not depend, for instance, on the narrow
ecology of edibles that informs mainstream U.S. food safety advocacy
(wherein bigger animals eat smaller animals, a logic that articulates
the threat of ocean fish to humans). It serves as a reminder that to the
degree that mainstream animacy frameworks have become dominant
law, such law could potentially be recodified if the animate orders on
which it depends were interrupted. The interruptions demand recog-
nizing the contradictions within matter itself—whether through ac-
cepting that worldviews (and their cosmologies) are legitimately con-
testable, especially in a time of problematization and retrenchment
diagnosed as “posthuman,” or through revitalized understandings of

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matter’s own complexity that can cross the discursive boundaries of

science.
Cosmologies, of course, are as much written into Western philoso-
phies as they are in Akwesasne cultures, and the life and death hidden
within their objects has a binding effect on their theoretical impulse.
In her important book Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed gives exten-
sive, unabashed attention to tables, at one point writing extensively
about her “orientation” (in a larger discussion of sexuality and ori-
entations) toward a table of hers and that table’s orientation toward
her. She writes, “we perceive the object as an object, as something
that ‘has’ integrity, and is ‘in’ space, only by haunting that very space;
that is, by co-­inhabiting space such that the boundary between the
co-­inhabitants of space does not hold. The skin connects as well as
contains. . . . Orientations are tactile and they involve more than one
skin surface: we, in approaching this or that table, are also approached
by the table, which touches us when we touch it.”39 Ahmed works
here with an important and profound assertion by Maurice Merleau-­
Ponty that sensory engagement binds sensing and sensed objects to
one another; in this way, my skin is simultaneously the skin of the
world. Yet, if we were to stretch this intercorporeality further, it ap-
pears that Ahmed still presumes the proper integrity of her body and
of the table, an exclusion of molecular travel that permits her to posi-
tion one thing against another. Ahmed is talking mainly about the per-
ception of integrity; but I wonder what happens when percepts are to
some degree bypassed, for instance, by the air itself. When physically
copresent with others, I ingest them. There is nothing fanciful about
this. I am ingesting their exhaled air, their sloughed skin, and the skin
of the tables, chairs, and carpet of our shared room.
Ahmed’s reading thus takes the deadness and inanimacy of that table
as a reference point for the orientation of a life, one in which the table
is moved according to the purposes and conveniences of its owner.
And while it would be unfair to ask of her analysis something not
proper to its devices, I do wonder how this analysis might change
once the object distinctions between animate and inanimate collapse,
when we move beyond the exclusionary zone made up of the percep-
tual operands of phenomenology. The affective relations I have with
a couch are not made out of a predicted script and are received as no
different from those with animate beings, which, depending on the
perspective, is both their failing and their merit.

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My question then becomes: What is lost when we hold tightly to

that exceptionalism which says that couches are dead and we are live?
For would not my nonproductivity, my nonhuman sociality, render
me some other human’s “dead,” as certainly it has, in case after case of
the denial of disabled existence, emotional life, sexuality, or subjec-
tivity? And what is lost when we say that couches must be cathected
differently from humans? Or when we say that only certain couches as
they are used would deserve the attribution of a sexual fetish? These
are only questions to which I have no ready answers, except to declare
that those forms of exceptionalism no longer seem very reasonable.
Indeed, the literary scholar John Plotz’s careful review essay on new
trends in materiality theories, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing
Theory,” itself never arrives at confronting the possibility of the sofa’s
speech, seeming to presume that the question of sofas remains at the
level of humorous titular play, no explanation needed.40
It seems that animacy and its affects are mediated not by whether
you are a couch, a piece of metal, a human child, or an animal, but by
how holistically you are interpreted and how dynamic you are per-
ceived to be. Stones themselves move, change, degrade over time, but
in ways that exceed human scales. Human “patients” get defined, via
their companion technologies, as inanimate, even as they zip right
by you in a manual wheelchair. And above and beyond these fac-
tors related to the power of interpretation and stereotype, there is
the strict physicality of the elements that travel in, on, and through
us, and sometimes stay. If we ingest each other’s skin cells, as well
as each other’s skin creams, then animacy comes to appear as a cate-
gory itself held in false containment, insofar as it portends exterior-
ized control relationships rather than mutual imbrications, even at the
most material levels. Nancy Tuana, reading New Orleans after Hur-
ricane Katrina in terms of interactionist ontology, writes, “There is
a viscous porosity of flesh—my flesh and the flesh of the world. This
porosity is a hinge through which we are of and in the world. I refer
to it as viscous, for there are membranes that affect the interactions.”41
Furthermore, the toxicity of the queer to the heterosexual collective
or individual body, the toxicity of the dirty subjects to the hygienic
State, the toxicity of heavy metals to an individual body: none of these
segregations perfectly succeeds even while it is believed with all effort
and investment to be effective.
In perhaps its best versions, toxicity does not repel but propels queer

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loves, especially once we release it from exclusively human hosts, dis-

proportionately inviting dis/ability, industrial labor, biological tar-
gets, and military vaccine recipients—inviting loss and its “losers”
and trespassing containers of animacy. We need not assign the train-­
licking boy of the previous chapter so surely to the nihilistic underside
of futurity or to his own termination, figurative or otherwise. I would
be foolish to imagine that toxicity stands in for “utopia” given the ex-
plosion of resentful, despairing, painful, screamingly negative affects
that surround toxicity. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to deny the queer
productivity of toxins and toxicity, a productivity that extends be-
yond an enumerable set of addictive or pleasure-­inducing substances,
or to neglect (or, indeed, ask after) the pleasures, the loves, the reha-
bilitations, the affections, the assets that toxic conditions induce. Un-
like viruses, toxins are not so very containable or quarantinable; they
are better thought of as conditions with effects, bringing their own
affects and animacies to bear on lives and nonlives. If we move beyond
the painful “antisocial” effects to consider the sociality that is present
there, we find in that sociality a reflection on extant socialities among
us, the queer-­inanimate social lives that exist beyond the fetish, be-
yond the animate, beyond the pure clash of human body sex.

Affective Futures
A chapter on mercurial affect would not be complete without some
accounting for autism. While autism’s etiology remains controver-
sial, a significant number of accounts tie childhood autism to the
neurotoxicity of environmental mercury, with much attention to
vaccines.42 (This is surely not true of all accounts. Some people, in-
cluding Amanda M. Baggs, who appears later, explicitly disavow it.)
Environmental mercury occurs in two forms, inorganic and organic
(methyl) mercury. Much of the debate has occurred over whether
the inorganic form of mercury is toxic to human bodies. Much of
the noncontroversial, undebated alarm about mercury toxicity has
focused on fish, which are not damaged by methyl mercury, even as
they accumulate it; once ingested, methyl mercury is toxic to human
beings. However, many have claimed that the inorganic form of mer-
cury can be converted partially by the human body into the organic
form. The classic developmental understanding of autism does not
conform to the popular understanding of “mercuriality,” most com-

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monly associated with Minamata or “mad hatter’s syndrome.” Mer-

curiality f­ ocuses on adult responses to mercury intoxication, which by
definition are not about child development. My invocation of autism
in relation to “mercurial affect” here is not a closed one and is most
certainly not a theory. It is a purposeful inclusion in a history that has
yet to be told, and is hence, as I write today, to a certain degree ex-
perimental. The inclusion is part of my attempt to plumb the connec-
tions between toxic elements and toxic bodies; that is, bodies which
are deemed “sick” are either seen as affected by toxic elements to the
point of entering disability categories or are themselves considered a
polluting scourge upon human normative securities.
To begin, I revisit a question I posed at the end of chapter 2: what
are the possibilities of rejoinder, of response, for those considered
nonsubjects or errant subjects? For it has not escaped me that there
is an ironic, yet all too true, possibility of reading medicalization into
the descriptive linguistics terminology for the components of actions.
Verbal actions are described as being executed by agents and performed
on patients. As a linguist, I can use this jargon with pleasure and the ex-
citement of precision. Yet its use also sometimes hurts, because in con-
ventional use, the noun patient refers to an object of Western medical
treatment. The linguist Suzanne Fleischman writes that Western bio-
medical discourse on disease “tends to cast the sufferer in the role of
a passive substrate, or medium, on which the more interesting player
in the game, the disease, operates.”43 Hence, disabled and ill people,
particularly given their medicalized locations in U.S. society, occupy
a rather strict container and a subhuman locus on animacy hierarchies;
that is, other humans “operate on” these ones. Here I examine not only
the possibilities for simple rejoinder—being a subject of one’s own
expression—but for a challenge to the very animacy hierarchy, which
is simultaneously an ontology of affect.
I turn first to perhaps the best-­known spokesperson for autism,
Temple Grandin, whose self-­representation speaks to the animacy
hierarchy in a very interesting way, for it is both rendered in first-­
person experience and explained using discourses of science. Grandin
gained fame precisely through her accomplishments in animal wel-
fare, including descriptions of how nonhuman animals think and feel,
and her autobiographical accounts of living with autism. In an ex-
traordinarily communicative book, and in interviews and other writ-
ings, Grandin expresses precisely the ambivalence reported by many

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people with autism and Asperger’s regarding their “human” expressi-

bility: that while she may communicate very well, this is a skill she
has had to learn through unusual means, and that the most natural
and consonant communication for her occurs with nonhuman ani-
mals (which, perhaps contrary to expectation, she calls simply ani-
mals).44 Though she does not herself claim this, Grandin’s work makes
possible the insight that a turn toward nonhuman animals need not be
considered itself an antisocial turn, and that people with autism need
not be thought of as antisocial. Rather, Grandin traces a set of positive
relations among autistic people and nonhuman animals.
Nor are all autistic people’s claims merely about communalisms, kin-
ship, or affection with nonhuman animals. A plethora of scholarship,
expressive arts, and reported experience speak to a greater significance
of inanimate objects than is normatively expected. The activist and
writer Amanda M. Baggs has, as part of her work articulating a neuro-
diversity framework, made and circulated several videos in which she
“translates” her experience of the world for a nonautistic viewership.
In 2007, Baggs created a video titled “In My Language.” The You-
Tube video is accompanied with an explanation that the video’s pur-
pose is not to do a “look-­at-­the-­autie peep gawking freakshow”—a
constant risk for disabled people’s self-­expression—but a “statement
about what gets considered thought, intelligence, personhood, lan-
guage, and communication, and what does not.”45 The first part,
Baggs annotates, is “in my language” and consists only of her vocal,
touch, and hearing sense interactions with objects in the context of
her apartment: metal chains, staplers, plastic Slinkies, door handles,
dresser knobs, paper, books. The second part is a “translation, or at
least an explanation,” for English readers: overlaid on Baggs’s inter-
actions with more objects, lines of text appear on the screen that are
simultaneously automated as computerized text-­to-­speech. (A dog
often appears in the background.) Significantly for this chapter, the
video represents to me an important juncture between expressibil-
ity commensurable with normative human language and expressed
distance from that normativity. Baggs points out two critical ironies
within mainstream beliefs that hinge attributions of personhood and
proper sociality on material practices, specifically interactions with
things:
Far from being purposeless / the way that I move / is an ongoing
response to what is around me. / Ironically, the way that I move /

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when responding to everything around me / is described as “being

in a world of my own” / whereas if I interact with a much more lim-
ited set of responses / and only react to a much more limited part
of my surroundings / people claim that I am / “opening up to true
interaction with the world.” . . . However the thinking of people like
me / is only taken seriously / if we learn your language, / no mat-
ter how we previously thought or interacted. . . . It is not enough
to look and listen / and taste and smell and feel, / I have to do those
to the right things / such as look at books / and fail to do them to
the wrong things / or else people doubt I am a thinking being / and
since their definition of thought / defines their definition of per-
sonhood / so ridiculously much / they doubt that I am a real per-
son as well.
Baggs thus very effectively reverses the given economies of language
and affect. The transobjective tack is subtly suggested by the notion
that her relationality with objects could be interrupted by an exclu-
sive focus on human sociality, indeed that such relations might be
somehow enabled by the absence of attention to human sociality. The
lesson I take from this passage is that we would be well advised not
simply to denounce Baggs’s transobjectivity as problematic from some
normative perspective, but rather to ask what it might mean of ob-
jects, what it might say of humanness and the ways it must push on the
carefully guarded subjectivities proper to the human. Furthermore,
to pathologize such object relationships out of hand would also be to
pathologize a great many kinds of long-­standing, but politically sup-
pressed, cosmologies. These include the Potawatomi world-­relating
mentioned in chapter 1 and other cosmologies dubbed indigenous that
are less characterized by a categorical, stringent attachment to human
exclusivity.
Examining relationships between people with illness, or autism,
and inanimate objects is not without its risks, for it can easily re-
semble—or be taken up as—a repathologization or a validation of
pathologization. That is to say, while these relationships are impor-
tant to recognize, they should not be unreflectively used to naturalize
such people and objects to lower positions on hierarchalized animacy
scales, while normative positions themselves are renaturalized to the
top. For example, Licia Carlson observes that human intellectual dis-
ability is commonly brought up in arguments about speciesism and
in general populates philosophical arguments about animals; thus, the

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intellectually disabled are unthinkingly used to populate “the face of

the beast” in more than glancing terms.46 My own belonging in this
human-­object field of recognition (as someone, for instance, whose
illness brought me into renewed and vitalized intimacies with inani-
mate objects) does not shed me of responsibility for asking what it is I
am doing, what is the status of my example, and how to move toward,
not away from, justice in my use of an archive.
But I also draw—perhaps surprisingly—from the affective politics
of Ann Cvetkovich’s important work on lesbian cultures of trauma.
Writing about therapeutic work on incest and its tendency to care-
fully disavow any possible relationship between incest and lesbianism,
she asks, “But why can’t saying that ‘sexual abuse causes homosexu-
ality’ just as easily be based on the assumption that there’s something
right, rather than something wrong, with being lesbian or gay?”47 I
do not mean to conflate incest, queerness, or disability so much as to
use this moment to think about the affective politics—within and
without scholarship—of desiring the canonically undesired: desiring
disability, desiring queerness, desiring objects. As Robert McRuer and
Abby Wilkerson write, there is a special resistant sense of “desiring
disability,” unlike fetishizations of disability, that embraces “practices
that would work to realize a world of multiple (desiring and desir-
able) corporealities interacting in nonexploitative ways.”48 Ultimately,
Baggs makes desiring disability possible not only by articulating such
relatedness through a visual modality that disidentifies with the ges-
tural tropes of “severe disability,” but by simultaneously releasing the
hold of an ableist language fully dependent on strict animacy hierar-
chies that are assimilated and are reasonably legitimate only for a very
specific set of people.49 It is a crip-­theoretical text.50
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, a South Indian immigrant to the
United States who has published poetry and narrative articulations
of his autism experience from an early age, participates in this debate
in a direct way. Among the objects taking importance in his learning
world is a long mirror, with which he remains in dialogue. Later, he
writes, “The curtains that moved in the wind, the big and small leaves
that moved a little more with the air because of their suspended posi-
tions, the little bits of paper, or the pages of an open book under a
fan were classified as autistic. They were affected with autism because
they flapped, because they would not respond to any blocks, because
they did not talk, and I was sure that they would not be able to imitate
the clinical psychologist.”51

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Mukhopadhyay applies a status mobility to objects that might

not otherwise be their province for a neurotypical thinker. It is not,
Mukhopadhyay asserts, irrelevant to think that a curtain might be au-
tistic too. The normative “violation” Mukhopadhyay commits is to
refuse the animate locatability of autism toward those objects and to
remember that it is only a possibility, not a given. Mukhopadhyay’s
writing simply disregards the sure pathologization of the transobjec-
tive worlds that some autisms engage. To loosen the pathologizing ties
that bind normalcy to normalcy, or nonnormalcy to nonnormalcy, in
human object worlds is to reassert the status mobilities of “humans,”
“animals,” and “objects” in the many worlds they populate.
Let me say more about a particular object—a stone—as it has been
encoded and applied to human sexualities. Within butch or femme
lesbian culture, being “stone” or “stone butch” is a particular erotic
and sexual formation. It does not suggest an outright lack of agency
or power—as an animate hierarchy might predict—but a particu-
lar sexual economy of affect in which the butch’s sexual pleasure can
emerge from the touch instigated by her, whereas she prefers not to
be touched by her lover. The stoneness of butch can also refer to the
masculinities of expressive life for butches: feelings held in, the ap-
pearance of unfeeling. “Being stone” is thus not merely a queer affect;
it also tugs at and traverses the animacy hierarchy’s affective econ-
omy with regard to both feeling and touch.52 “Stones in My Pockets,
Stones in My Heart,” Eli Clare’s early discussion of trans and butch
locations, sexual abuse, and the importance of telling troubled histo-
ries for movement politics, can be read as shadowed by the affective
print of stone butch, offering us a relation between the feeling and
being of butch into the material forms of stones: stones in the pocket
warmed by Clare’s hands, stones in the heart, stones lying together in
an array.53
Clare wrote in this essay as a female-­bodied person searching for
places between butch and trans: “I turn my pockets and heart inside
out, set the stones—quartz, obsidian, shale, agate, scoria, granite—
along the scoured top of the wall I once lived behind, the wall I still
use for refuge. They shine in the sun, some translucent to the light,
others dense, solid, opaque. I lean my body into the big unbreakable
expanse, tracing which stones need to melt, which will crack wide,
geode to crystal, and which are content just as they are.”54 The stones
are of Clare’s heart (integral) and in Clare’s pocket (exterior); Clare is

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and is not stone; Clare is and is of stone. Rather than considering the
stones as simple structuring metaphor, we can read this piece as one
about an intimate co-­relation, one defined by both integrality and
proximity, in which the stones—themselves multiple and variant, di-
versely opaque or translucent—also feel, need, shift, transform. Their
draw to Clare, and Clare’s engagement with them, complete a kind of
environmental assemblage, of names, expression, subcultures, affects,
prosthesis, material existence, and being.
It is simply wrong to say that, for instance, people with autism and
stone butches—both of whom are popularly depicted as lacking emo-
tion—are “affectless.” Neither the untouchability that some people
with autism possess (for instance, many people with autism describe
it as an overwhelming surfeit of sensory information), nor the sexual
untouchability of certain butch-­identified women need be thought of
as a construction of self in response to a historical trauma. Yet touch-
ing by others in spite of an orientation of not being touched can be
experienced as traumatic. J. Jack Halberstam aptly points out that
stone butchness is often wrongly popularly portrayed as a pathologi-
cal state of femaleness, while men, for instance, who do not wish to
be penetrated are simply viewed as normal.55 Extending this point fur-
ther, we might imagine that to the extent that sexual or abled identi-
ties rely on particular histories, those histories should not be so stably
sutured to definitions of physical or sexual harm’s own historicity. A
definition of harm that is reliant on the possibility of present or im-
minent injury, rather than reliant on a vision of reiterations of past
trauma that defines a person’s pathology or disability, locates hurt, like
Clare’s stones, ambivalently: both inside and outside of the body, both
inside and outside of the self, both in sociopolitical structure and in
the individual instance.
But what is a toxic body, after all? How can we reconceptualize a
harmful body when our bodies are themselves deemed harmful to
others? It is useful here to turn to queer theory’s uptake of the toxic,
where it retained a certain resonance and a certain citational pull.
Eve Sedgwick’s use of toxic to describe an expellable interiority (one
that shameful elements are not, since they are proper terms of one’s
identity) is taken up in Muñoz’s Disidentifications to refer to discur-
sively toxic elements, the “toxic force” of illicit desire, and images and
stereotypes toxic to identity, all uses that seem to repeat Sedgwick’s
ultimately exterior, or alienated, quality of toxicity.56 For Muñoz, dis-

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identification represents the willing uptake of toxic elements to pose

new figurations of identity and minoritarian-­majoritarian politics.
Taking Muñoz’s suggestions further, and taking toxicity’s ontologi-
cal shape-­shifting from mercury to traumatic sociality seriously, I be-
lieve that we can, in a sense, claim toxicity as already “here,” already
a truth of nearly every body, and also as a biopolitically interested
distribution (the deferral of toxic work to deprivileged or already
“toxic subjects”). Such a distribution, in its failure to effectively seg-
regate, leaks outside of its bounds to “return,” and it might allow a
queer theoretical move that readily embraces, rather than refuses in
advance, heretofore unknown reflexes of raciality, gender, sexuality,
(dis-­)ability.57 In assuming both individual and collective vulnera-
bility, it suggests an ulterior ethical stance.58 If we were to release tox-
icity from its own stalwart anti-­ness, its ready definition as an unwel-
come guest, it has the possibility to intervene into the binary between
the segregated fields of “life” and “death,” vitality and morbidity. Tox-
icity straddles boundaries of “life” and “nonlife,” as well as the literal
bounds of bodies (quite independently of toxicity’s immunitary rep-
resentation), in ways that introduce a certain complexity to the pre-
sumption of integrity of either lifely or deathly subjects.
Using the worldly ontologies described earlier, we might consider
reframing the terms of intimacy itself, so that it might not be re-
stricted to operating between only human or animate entities. Inti-
macy is, furthermore, temporalized, in the sense that it is cognate with
intimation. Intimacy might be thought of as a temporalized notion in-
sofar as it might provide a hint or prediction of the future. In these
final paragraphs, I connect the “aberrant” socialities implicated within
discourses of toxicity to those suggested in queer (political) futures.
What futurity might such a present suggest, particularly if we read
these futures back into politically sexualized and racialized maps of
desirability and repulsion? Here I draw inspiration from the feminist
disability theorist Alison Kafer, whose book theorizes a queer-­crip
approach to disability, one that, in its disentangling of the discourses
of morbidity and sexual exile that contain and fix dis/abled bodies,
refuses the “grim imagined futures” associated with them and moves
toward a resolutely optimistic futurity.59
According to J. Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place, above and
beyond the temporal closures and fissures wrought by (the U.S. ad-
vent of ) aids, the queer life narrative necessarily has a trajectory very

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different from heterosexual, heteronormative, reproductive time.60

Such a notion of queer time can be worked to emphasize its racial and
gendered dimensions. On the “racial” dimension of time, or racial-
ized temporality, David Eng has argued that it was Freud’s attempt
to negate the primitive that fundamentally motivated and underlaid
his developmental narrative of sexuality, as well as his rendering of
homosexuality.61 The idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny rep-
licates itself teleologically in science and in public life alike, for in-
stance, in the notion that child is to adult as primitive is to modern.
Thus, the animalization of (queer) children cannot be divorced from
the vote-­bearing African American figure in the nineteenth-­century
Harper’s Weekly cartoon considered in chapter 3. Interracial frame-
works—whether human or animal or stone (which bears the mark
of “nature”)—are constantly haunted by the possibility of anachro-
nism. Within global capitalism’s racialized arrangements of labor, the
racially marked body in the contemporary or modernist moment is
a “freaky” subject of unacceptable temporal transit. It is not coinci-
dental that in the United States the animality of childhood, in which
a child represents an animalizable early evolutionary stage, is the only
(marginally) acceptably queer one.
Thus, both queer and racial temporalities are a kind of shimmering
presence. They are less easily bound to capital or to any other regi-
mented time; or perhaps we could say that the time of capital is also
no longer in the form it might have once been. And so queer and
racially marked bodies are present (that is, in the present time) but
strangely so, embracing anachronism and “touching the past” (to evoke
the historian Carolyn Dinshaw).62
Heather Love suggests in her introduction to Feeling Backward, an
exploration of literary texts that circle around queer suffering, that
the contemporary juncture of affect studies and queer studies is at-
tentive to the possibility that it is presently at a turning point, asking
how to articulate or assume a queer political vision (within and be-
yond scholarship) that must do something with its history of shame,
stigma, embarrassment, and pain. She describes this as “the empha-
sis on damage in queer studies.”63 Recent work has engaged a turn
toward the embrace of acknowledgment of abjection as a site of work
and healing in domains such as literature, the creative arts, and sexual
practices, particularly in relation to queer of color proximities to racial
abjection. Juana María Rodríguez theorizes the importance of politi-

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 Chapter Six

cally incorrect desire, exercised in sexual fantasy, as one kind of utopic

practice: she advises that “we must learn to read submission and ser-
vice differently,” even if—or as—we find ourselves occupying sexual
positions written through with painful histories.64 Indeed, the antipa-
thy toward submission or service in and of itself does seem to col-
lude too neatly with the autonomous urges of neoliberal culture, and
would do well to think through the arguments for interdependence
articulated within disability theory and activism.
Toxicity, at least in its mode of “intoxication,” embraces the ambiva-
lent, in Love’s words, “abject/exalted” combination proper to queer-
ness itself. (She even uses the words damage and toxicity to refer, as
Muñoz and Sedgwick do, to the stigmatization of queerness and the
painful affects associated with the recuperation of historical texts that
represent “tear-­soaked accounts of same-­sex desire.”)65 Negativity and
death, of course, also attach to disabled bodies with terrible regularity,
and they appear in different valences. But affective nuances are in-
formative. Ato Quayson’s literary study Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability
and the Crisis of Representation focuses on doubt: he traces a notion of
“skeptical interlocution” through a number of literary works, suggest-
ing that “there is always an anticipation of doubt within the percep-
tual and imagined horizon of the disabled character in literature, and
that this doubt is incorporated into their representation.”66 Quayson’s
study suggests a complication of sociality by a negating affect.
In view of the attempts of these works to suggest a future politics, or
the recommendations for politics that might be extracted from them,
toxic affect is certainly not suggested as a panacea. It is a (re-­)solu-
tion to the question of what to do with the ambivalence of queer-
ness only to the extent that it does not represent a choice: it is already
here, it is not a matter of queer political agency so much as a queered
political state of the present. If toxicity is ambivalently constructed
by a barely tenable political community, that fragility is not acknowl-
edged. Nevertheless, an uptake, rather than a denial of, toxicity seems
to have the power to turn a lens on the anxieties that produce it and
allow for a queer knowledge production that gives some means for
structural remedy while not abandoning a claim to being just a little
bit “off.” The growing acknowledgment of a shared condition of tox-
icity within the United States—not only in terms of citing numbers of
toxins present in people’s bodies, toxins whose hospitality toward the
body is uncertain (or toward whom the body doesn’t know whether it

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 Following Mercurial Affect

should be hospitable), but also in terms of the resigned acknowledg-

ment that toxic assets were part of the fabric of U.S. capitalism—is not
just evidence of a fall, or a radical shifting of political and economic
fortunes. It is also evidence that the interstices of the otherwise suf-
focating cultures of neoliberalism may be engaged, productive, and
immensely meaningful.
Thus, toxicity, as a queer thing or affect, both is and is more than
horizon, which is unpredictable and, furthermore, synchronically
traceable only to the extent that we not remain ontologically faith-
ful. Toxicity fails over and again to privilege rationality’s favorite part-
ner, the human subject, rather defaulting to chairs, couches, and other
sexual orientations, but we might be wrong to disavow its claim to
rationality altogether. If we let affect fall to object life, or to the inter-
animation that surrounds us, one example of which toxicity illumi-
nates very precisely, then perhaps there is a chance to take up (not re-
vive, as it is far from “old and tired”) queer as something both like itself
and yet also entirely different.

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 Afterword
The Spill and the Sea

On September 19, 2010, the oil well in the Macondo Prospect region
of the Gulf of Mexico—which had ruptured five months earlier, on
April 20, spilling an estimated two hundred million barrels of oil into
the Gulf—was finally declared to be sealed. This closure led to a wave
of relief that the threat had somehow been contained, and that fur-
ther pollution of the Gulf would no longer occur (at least not at such
an uncontrollable pace). The next day, the spill’s National Incident
Commander, Thad Allen, acknowledged in an interview that “we’re
actually negotiating how clean is clean,” going on to explain that this
phrase was “a euphemism we use at the end of an oil spill to say, is
there anything else we can do? And, sometimes, there will still be oil
there, but then the agreement is that there can be no more technical
means applied to it, and we’re all going to agree that this one is done
as far as what we can do.”1
Allen concluded the interview with a lively mixture of metaphors:
both immediate “cleanup” and long-­term “recovery” should be the
goal; the residents of the coast have had “a lot of stuff laid at their
door” and they “have a way of life that has been threatened down
there.” It was unclear whether “recovery” meant the health of the Gulf
or the economic well-­being of the human residents of the Gulf, but
clearly some kind of affliction was implied. Of course, metaphors of
health and treatment have a peculiar history in national economic dis-
courses; consider the phrase shock therapy (commonly associated with
 Afterword

the economist Jeffrey Sachs) used to describe a radical economic re-

form in the direction of free markets, deregulation, and public dis-
investment.2
More often than not, articulations of the oil’s danger, or the oil dis-
persant’s toxicity (untested at such quantities), to sea creatures were
made not for their sake but for the purpose of identifying a risk to
an economic source of “livelihood” for the human professional resi-
dents of the U.S. Gulf shores, the fishermen and fisherwomen and
the economy built around them. Many of the fishermen and -women
(though it is unclear how many, and it is hard to disentangle such
language from locally controlled bp media interests) were content to
rely on their symbiotic relationship to their local environment, using
cash payments and barter systems, and did not see fit to record and
report income to the irs tax system, habits of nonengagement which
imperiled their future compensation by bp. In interviews with those
workers, however, the distinction between “sources of revenue” and
“living beings” was often blurred; their expressed pain did not appear
to distinguish between the lost generations of shrimp and their own
generativity of income.
The well was one of a newer generation of offshore deep-­ocean
wells, part of an adventurous effort by state governments and corpo-
rations to control heretofore inaccessible domestic resources by sup-
porting deep-­sea oil drilling offshore at ever-­greater depths. When
the well “blew,” Allen acknowledged that containment efforts at such
depths were “unprecedented,” raising questions about what kinds of
design principles and fail-­safe procedures had been pursued in the case
of the newer deep-­well ventures. The politics of ownership of the well
and its products and the responsibility for the spill’s casualties are ex-
tremely complex, as with virtually any transnational projects involv-
ing property. While the Macondo well itself is owned by bp, the Ex-
clusive Economic Zone where the Macondo Prospect was located is a
geocapital entity that extends spatially into waters defined as “inter-
national” while retaining U.S. control over marine resources.3 Addi-
tionally, bp was working with a leased drilling rig, the Deepwater
Horizon, as well as subcontracting with Halliburton Energy Services,
which was responsible for establishing the seal over the well. Under
bp’s directive, the seal process was hastened and security measures
were reduced (some against Halliburton’s recommendations). Due to
an inappropriate seal, methane gas escaped and flew up the drill col-

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 The Spill and the Sea

umn, exploding upon its rapid expansion into the ship. A faulty blow-
out preventer failed to cut off the gushing oil that ensued, at the level
of an estimated tens of thousands of barrels a day.
Leading up to and following the sealing of the well on Septem-
ber 19, 2010, the news media stuck with extreme regularity to a num-
ber of phrases referring to the state of the well: “killed,” “killed for
good,” “dead,” “effectively dead,” and even “permanently dead.” Such
deathly—and lifely—language was summoned to refer to a situation
that was much more complicated and only raised further questions. To
what degree was such language strategically used to motivate a wave
of transformed affect of relief or newfound security across the United
States and beyond, a wave of assurance that the monster had been van-
quished?4 How and in what sense was the well ever alive? Was the well
conceivable, in strictly biological terms, as a single living unit? As the
well is a general vessel for pools of oil, the burden of living proof then
falls on the oil; hydrocarbons, oil’s primary constituent, thus continue
to comprise the matter of contemporary industrialized energy.
The well’s excessive porosity, mainly in the form of a single leaching
point, was used to deem its sudden lifeliness; indeed, the very fact that
it was not generally containable rendered it alive, when common con-
ceptions of the living body are that it is generally a contained unit. But
if we accept this definition of “alive,” then how “dead” was the well
upon being sealed? In human cases, physicians declare death under
certain precise neural conditions (generally the irreversible ceasing of
all brain function), often while certain tissues and organs are still bio-
logically valid. The preoccupation among media and among govern-
ment and bp representatives with declaring the well “dead” is remark-
able. Slippages occur, however, in the category of “dead”: even though
“effectively dead,” the well had not yet been subjected to “plugging
and abandonment,” in the words of Allen, suggesting that irreversible
containment needed to be complemented with a withdrawal of vital
engagement.
Working with Allen’s articulations of the closing process, we could
say that the conceptions animated in the closure of this human-­led
natural disaster were, on the one hand, life and death and, on the
other hand, dirtiness and cleanliness, where “dirtiness” was paired
with “death” and “cleanliness” with “life.” The pure animation of the
oil—until some of it evaporated, and some of it settled, and some of
it got consumed by the “naturally occurring” bacteria in the Gulf—

225
 Afterword

was dramatized and literalized by video coverage of the spewing drill

pipe in the water. Its animacy, spectacular to the degree that it drama-
tized the uncontrollable shifting or transformation of matter at scales
that dwarf and overwhelm human bodies, resembled other “natural
disasters” like tornadoes, whose rapid shifting of matter occurs in the
air rather than in the water, and even monster and horror movies such
as Godzilla or Twister, whose horrific elements operate similarly as a
threat of uncontrollable scale.
Visual and affective politics, and decisions thereof, surrounded the
spill and its aftereffects at multiple levels. The people hired to clean
up the surface oil included local fishermen in need of replacement in-
come and so-­called disaster migrants, largely made up of Latinos who
relocate to work at changing disaster sites. We learned, in a few quietly
released news stories, that initially the cleanup workers were not only
not provided protective respirators but actively forbidden from wear-
ing protective equipment, as reported in at least a few cases. While bp
restricted news reporters from being anywhere in the area and should
therefore theoretically have been safe from image-­based indictment,
it still desired any images of the cleanup to show humans free of ap-
parent threat. (For reasons unknown, I was unsuccessful in obtaining
permission from bp’s Video Department for the publication of before
and after—“alive” and “dead”—images of the Macondo well.) For bp,
whatever threat existed seemed to be divided into two irreconcilable
domains: any threat to the “environment” was to the aesthetic pres-
ervation of the shore, and any threat to “humans” was only economic
(that is, the reproductive cycles of some Gulf seafood, the fishing that
they depended on for income, might possibly be interrupted). The
notion of toxicity, which would have connected these stories, was
largely bypassed in favor of the cleavage of these narratives.
Still, clashing layers of disease discourse piled up on one another:
the oil that “contaminated” the landscape had to be cleaned up by
human workers, and a further contaminant was represented by the
dispersants themselves. Human cleanup workers on the surface were
being subjected to toxic exposures while “protecting” the contami-
nated environment. bp’s attitude was that the mere viewing of safety
equipment, presumably across the nation, could lead to mass “hys-
teria,” an unacceptable gendering of a nation already on the (bio-­)
defense. It is no surprise, somehow, that “dead” and “killed” were re-
cruited to perform a kind of cognitive blanket to augment bp’s ap-

226
 The Spill and the Sea

parent power, control, and masculine righteousness over all forms of

matter.
At bottom, the overbearing use of dead and killed functioned as an
admission that a toxic spill was a lifely thing: lifely, perhaps, beyond its
proper bounds. The well itself was alive, and not only because some-
thing had flowed out of it with such vivid animation. It was a threat
to life in the Gulf, as well as to a way of life. This occlusion of life over
marginal life speaks, as I see it, to the inadequacy of lifely notions
as a framework for governance, medicine, and vernacular affect and
makes room for a concept like animacy, which encodes forces without
being beholden to the failing categories of life and nonlife. As I have
argued in this book, animacy permits an even more thorough registra-
tion of the role of racial, geopolitical, affective, and sexualized politics
therein.
This is one vision of a contemporary biopolitical “ending”: the
plugged Gulf well, good and dead, no longer a threat to a vulner-
able sea. But I do not wish to end here, for the lessons of the Gulf
spill feel disingenuous, particularly in a book that has been very much
about places and sources of unexpected life. So let us also consider
the inhabitants of Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Ponyo, released in
2008, which is, like the bp oil spill catastrophe, a land-­water drama,
though one revealingly designed as a dreamscape in which “the ocean
is a living presence.”5 The titular character, Ponyo, is a little fish (am-
biguously raced) who desires to become a human and has strong af-
fective ties to a little boy, Setsuke. She is not alone: she has a father,
a kind of magician of the ocean who tends to its health by summon-
ing potions which move and transform ocean matter, living or dead;
a mother-­goddess who seems almost metaphysical in form, but who
makes occasional human-­size departures; and a whole lot of little sis-
ters who resemble her fish form, but are smaller in size, literally her
“little sisters” (figure 19). They are her comfort and support when she is
in the ocean. And this sea, as Miyazaki comments, “is animated not as a
backdrop to the story, but as one of its principal characters.”6 Anima-
tion here works in multiple ways: both conjuring animacy and refer-
ring to the illustrated style and fantastical figuration of the film itself.
In Miyazaki’s visual narrative, however, the distinction between
land and sea is blurred: indeed, it is hardly a hostile relationship or,
as in the case of the bp spill, an economic one primarily. The border
between land and sea simply shifts upward in the wake of a tsunami-­

227
 Afterword

19. Ponyo’s little sisters. Ponyo (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2008).

induced flood. Miraculously, despite the flood, death seems not what
is at stake (“terror” and “contagion” is displaced by “magic,” perhaps?),
and the anxieties that exist are based on a disparate bunch of concerns,
including electricity, protection for the elderly residents of the retire-
ment home, and Setsuke’s father being lost at sea. Ultimately, no one
is killed; the big fish simply swim along what were formerly roads for
automobiles; Setsuke’s house remains above water; and the humans
have simply remained buoyant, in boats, on the surface. Ponyo’s little
sisters are the ulterior oil plumes, animated little particles that have
shared feelings. Collectively, they are affective matter.
I am reminded here of J. Jack Halberstam’s work on animated movies
featuring bees. Halberstam observes that animation films which cen-
ter on bees display alternative political organizations despite not going
so far as to observe, for instance, the matriarchal aspect of bee soci-
eties. That is, there are moments when more exact investigation of
lived animal formations is generative. Halberstam nicely assumes this
appropriability of reference not as a means of restoring final honesty
to a signifier, but as a means toward political ends, suggesting that if
mainstream animation filmmakers did study the lives of actual bees,
bee fiction might do better than its currently middling job at repre-
senting a kind of feminist or otherwise progressive politics.7 The case
of Ponyo’s little sisters presents an alternative political organization of
a hybrid posthuman-­goddess-­fish family which, in Miyazaki’s con-
figuration, is matriarchally structured and, unlike what human pro-

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 The Spill and the Sea

creation predicts, involves a set of hundreds and hundreds of siblings,

siblings that are not necessarily the less-­autonomous “little sister” de-
serving of protection.
Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli is known for being judicious about when
it takes advantage of the convenience of computer-­generated imagery
(cgi) technologies, which Halberstam has observed is technology’s
latest imaginative feat in the representability of enormous collectivi-
ties (“hordes”) and their accompanying political formations within
animation. Ponyo’s many little sisters, even if they were so numerous
as to make up a “horde,” were thus not multiply generated copies of
a replicated single sister, launched at different points in her repeating
dynamic smiling, speaking, and fluttering actions to induce the per-
ception of difference and individuation. Rather, the supervising ani-
mator of the film, Katsuya Kondo, explained:
It wasn’t enough just to have a lot of sisters onscreen. Each sister
needed to move as an individual character. The scene in which the
sisters rescue the half-­fish, half-­human Ponyo was divided into three
stages—beginning, middle, and end—and the assistant animators
drew each sister carefully. We didn’t use any copies or cg, of course,
because everything was drawn by hand this time. While the work
was painstaking, it was easier to create the movements of an en-
semble by hand than by cg, and we took on this task because we
wanted to render those movements to our hearts’ content.8
The technicality of Kondo’s focus on mobility did not mitigate its
sweetness to me, for the sisters were “painstakingly” given life one by
one to the animators’ “hearts’ content.” The “animation” of Ponyo was
enriched by the multiple factors of animacy: sentience, movement, fa-
ciality, speech, and action upon something else—as well as the many
imaginative animations dreamed up by each creator for which the
final embodiment of a single sister was the culmination. Animation
is thus the end point of the setting-­off of many different animacies;
its careful consolidation of these animacies, particularly in the case of
Ponyo, is what sets it apart.
In her attempt to transmogrify into a human, Ponyo enters inter-
mediary stages where she sprouts chicken legs (figure 20). She ex-
periences her greatest exhilaration and exuberance at that in-­between
juncture: that chickenlike embodied site of interstitial land-­water and
fish-­human, rather than a site of confusing or distressing liminality,

229
 Afterword

20. Ponyo sprouts chicken legs. Ponyo (dir. Hayao Miyazaki, 2008).

yields an intensity easily read to viewers as pleasure. For Ponyo, the

promise of humanness exists in spite of all that humans have done.
The fish/chicken/little girl is far from a binary logic; she is a blend-
ing that is partial and contingent and enacted across time, yet the
blending is simultaneously robust and profound, effective and affec-
tive. Both air and seawater are the stuff of blends, the stuff of human,
animal, and godly mattering. If lungs no longer critically matter for
breathing, then the material difference between air and water also dis-
solves. The air-­seawater is also the stuff of sex, of the sensuous, sen-
sible exchange of breath, fluids, and parts; of meetings and interpene-
trations which may be “actual” or “virtual,” within which we need feel
no particular responsibility to any exceptional organs; of reproduc-
tion, of penetration, of reception, of animacy itself.
Still, “the real world in which matter matters most” inevitably haunts
even this promise of gratifying transmogrification. For all its fictive
identity as the ostensible setting of an animation film, the “Japan” that
quietly informs the villages, personalities, languages, and socialities of
Ponyo, as I write in spring 2011, too easily comes up against the Japan
that was devastated—in an overwhelming way in Fukushima, Miyagi,
and Iwate prefectures, as well as economically and affectively in its na-
tional ensemble—by an earthquake-­instigated tsunami ranging from
eight to twenty meters high on March 11, 2011. The tsunami, engulf-
ing smaller towns in the north of Japan that largely engaged in farm-
ing and fishing, disproportionately killed and displaced the elderly,

230
 The Spill and the Sea

putting into aching relief Miyazaki’s rehabilitative image of elderly

Japanese who have been submerged by a tsunami cavorting at the bot-
tom of the ocean (to their surprise).
Yet to construe this contemporary and actual tsunami-­radiation
compound event exclusively in ready terms of failure, loss, and death
risks a certain narrowing of imagination (surely justified for many
closest to these events) that relies on the dubious construct of “natu-
ral disaster” and necessarily prioritizes economy, humans, locality, and
national security. Once this kind of narrative is launched, it has only
a narrow path that leads to blaming either “the Japanese,” or the bad
disaster preparation, or the nuclear industry, or energy dependence,
or something else; perhaps there is even a quieter rejoicing at the ap-
parent failure of Japanese industrialism’s grasp on modernity, for all
its recent decades of challenge to the United States’s tale of economic
dominance. In the opening song to Ponyo, “Umi no Okasan” (Mother
sea), the lyrics sing of lost unity and beckon a return to the family of
countless siblings:
The sea lilies sway
In a world of blue
To brothers and sisters uncountable
We spoke in the bubbly, watery language of the sea
Do you remember when
So very, very long ago
We dwelt there together
Deep in the blue, blue sea?
The jellyfish, the sea urchins, the fish and the crabs
Were our family.9
The ending scenes of the film execute this new possible kinship be-
tween land and sea with the long-­desired transmogrification of Ponyo
into a human (albeit one who has a memory of being a fish) and the
compacting of this transition by an agreement between a human
(Sosuke), who agrees to care for her, and Ponyo’s mother who com-
mands the sea and makes the transition so. The antinomic controlling
magic of Ponyo’s waterborne father Fujimoto (an “exhuman”), which
allows him to transform and animate (and imprison) all kinds of mat-
ter, has been attenuated; in its place, we viewers have been trans-
formed into such magicians of imaginary and imaginative possibility
by our very witnessing of the transmogrifications that populate this

231
 Afterword

animation film and the gratitude and affection that attends the new
unities.
Memory here seems to be both the foundation of togetherness and
the target of extinction: Fujimoto’s “exhumanness” shifts from its sub-
stantive status as a toxic trace in his management of his world to a
feckless trace barred from boundary-­enforcing potency. At the same
time, the memory that constitutes the longing opening song perme-
ates the film: a longing for remembered togetherness can bring about
that worldly interanimation which yields the possibility of new re-
lations as well as beloved possibilities. Such contradictory tropes of
time provide us with anachronisms not constrained by progressivist
“healing,” appropriative or recuperative phylogenetic racial longing,
but rather by a queer “temporal drag,” or the “pull of the past upon
the present” (to use Elizabeth Freeman’s words), that retains a critical
ambivalence about where, what, and who we are.10
Following the ocean has its lessons, too, and does not necessitate
a well-­articulated cosmology like Miyazaki’s. Nor is it necessary to
simply reverse the affective response to either delight or numbness,
only to attempt to keep labile the affective economies that necessarily
subtend modern life, especially in late capitalism when one is con-
sidering something like a “natural disaster.” “Following the ocean,”
beyond the histories that oceans keep and the transterritorial human
epistemologies they provoke, helps us scramble and interrupt the ani-
macies that are both known and felt at the linguistic level, akin but
not limited to the paradigmatic plays of Derrida and the associative
games of Gertrude Stein, moving beyond streams of consciousness to
the affectively orthogonal disregard for the deeply vested intricacies
of “standardness” characteristic of English as a second language.11 And
beyond language, it helps us consider the minor, subtle, boundary-­
leaping memory traces that intoxications leave with us.
Though I began with language in this book, nowhere did I depend
upon a dry vision of resignification; rather, I remained attached to
a feeling for affect that subtends, exceeds, richly accompanies such
otherwise mechanistic understandings of words, animals, and metals.
It was against my own expectation for this book that I went back to
my roots in linguistics. My explicit return began when I became quite
attached to thinking about mobility (for instance, asking to what de-
gree cosmopolitanism played in the uptake of queer theory’s transna-
tional objects, or asking after mobility’s connection to abled embodi-

232
 The Spill and the Sea

ment). I came to the understanding that different mobilities meant

very different things, and that the differences often had something to
do with the animacy of the mobile or immobile object. I realized that
what might seem a stale debate about queer’s seemingly mobile mean-
ing and effectivity could still be richly informed from the perspective
of cognitive semantics. If any word’s meaning could shift and flex ac-
cording to its users, what was so special about the senses of queer?
While I could not, from this limited perspective, settle the debate
of whether queer was finally and universally special, I did attempt to
explain the reasons why it might be considered special by some. It
came down to queer’s status as either matterlike (a noun) or something
that affected, modified, the meaning, the very materiality, of other
things (an adjective, verb, adverb). I began to realize that queerness
had everything to do with animacy: it was an operator that shiftily
navigated gradations of matter, including things, actions, and sensi-
bilities. At the same moment, I took seriously the lessons of feminist,
antiracist, and political-­economic assertions that privilege had became
solidified into a lexeme that otherwise got a lot of credit for being un-
fixable.
Privilege has ultimately played multiple roles in this book. For I at-
tended, in some ways disproportionately, to the crafting of worldly
matter by privileged beings. Animate hierarchies have settled into
their current life as a palimpsest of a long journey through Aristote-
lian categorizations, Christian great chains of being, Linnaean typolo-
gies, biopolitical governances, capitalisms, and historical imperialisms;
these are the traces and marks of privileged views upon the world. To
the extent these hierarchies have been used to enact zones of defer-
ral, they have produced extraordinary fungibilities of entities in the
realms that lie below the white male at the top, the kinds of exchange
of matter that allow humans to “be” animals to “be” inanimate ob-
jects, while that equally fungible zone of highest privilege has re-
mained largely backgrounded. This is not to say, however, that only
the privileged take up these perspectives on the matter around us. For
their logics are written into the textures of this world, and our en-
meshment within it bespeaks our vexed and often painful complicity.
Those of us who can suitably duck them could be said perhaps to ac-
cess the counterprivileges of biopolitical irrelevance.
Furthermore, my own location with regard to privilege is not lost
on me. As much as I track the empire’s traces, indelible marks, re-

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 Afterword

gurgitations, phobias, and abandonments—as much as I occupied a

place of social toxicity by the genderings and transgenderings, dis-
ablements, and racializations that have befallen and become me—I,
too, write from the seat and time of empire. I have not forgotten
Jacqui Alexander’s prompt ever since I heard it: what can we do as
intellectuals within and without academies from the seat of empire,
particularly to encounter the problem of the “here and now” ver-
sus the “then and there” that colonial and imperial time naturalize?12
The concept of animacy has functioned for me in this book as one of
many diverse and multimodal attempts to reach across this compacted
condensation of time-­space, always with the awareness that there is
so much more to do and to imagine. With an eclectic traversal of ob-
jects and affects, this book tracked both the paradoxical naturaliza-
tions of animacy hierarchies (for instance, in the form of racialized
animal anachronisms) and the rejoinders launched by contemporary
animacies (unintended reimaginations of kinship and intense intima-
cies), only some of which remain in a human domain of disidentifi-
cation. Some animacies remained quite corrupt; others seemed par-
ticularly enlivened by a capacity to romp through, under, and over
such hierarchical knowledges. Finally, I claim the “eclectic,” perhaps
reflexively, while remaining keenly aware of its role as a disclaimer for
exceedingly, rudely feral transdisciplinarity. My archive of apes, theo-
ries, turtles, sensoria, cartoons, mercury particles, airborne skin, signi-
fying lexemes, and racialized humans has seemed entirely logical, that
is, to me; yet the label of “eclecticism” rings true, in my view, from a
perspective that is wedded to institutional typologies of intellectual
reference and styles of thinking. At the same time, animate affinities
do bring these bodies together, and that, whether delivered under the
protective bandage of “eclectic,” has ultimately been my point.
Animacy hierarchies slip and give, but they do not do so willy-­nilly:
I have suggested that they slip in particular privileged terms of sexu-
ality, race, and ability, perhaps in part because these are the fragile
grounds upon which they have been built in popular ontologies and
political cultures in the United States: race because the formation of
animal and animality has been enriched by colonial histories; sexuality
because the discussions of kind, genre, production, and reproduction
with regard to such an ontology inevitably call forth concerns of sexu-
ality broadly conceived; ability because the human body and subject
have resolutely been imagined as able-­bodied, in a god’s image. My

234
 The Spill and the Sea

conviction that hierarchies are contingent and mobile lies in my sense

that their rigidity must be promulgated and not simply rest in truth.
Not only, for instance, might stones be multivalent, as both building
materials and divine representants in some aspects of Inkan or Japa-
nese cultures,13 but they are, despite their mainstream representation
as dead and inanimate, dynamic and even moving, changing and shift-
ing at a time scale that seems to outrun human life spans (if we ignore
that human bodies themselves are capable of making calcium deposits
that are, for all practical purposes, stones) and that lies beyond the
narrower time cycles of capitalism. What might it be to take stones as
“more than a thing to ignore”?14
I take inspiration here from the artist, disability rights activist,
and animal rights advocate Sunaura Taylor, who writes: “In my life
I have been compared to many animals. I have been told I walk like
a monkey, eat like a dog, have hands like a lobster, and generally re-
semble a chicken or penguin. . . . The thing is, they were right. I do
resemble a monkey when I walk—or rather I resemble an ape, spe-
cifically a chimpanzee. . . . This resemblance is simply true, as is the
statement I eat ‘like a dog’ when I don’t use my hands and utensils
to eat. These comparisons have an element of truth that isn’t nega-
tive—or, I should say that doesn’t have to be negative.”15 Taylor uses
the recognition of this likeness—we might say a being-­like—as a basis
for a revised ethics. Such radical thingness as stoneness, I insist, can be
visited, can be felt, and can have been; if that still seems more plausible
than humanness being visited and felt by stones (with thanks, say, to
humans’ being rendered so pervasively as commodity), I have at least
attempted to plumb the boundaries and animate conditions of such
orders of plausibility and suggested ways we might divest from such
unthought conditions.
In her text “Animation, Apostrophe, and Abortion,” Barbara John-
son writes of the peculiar “animation”—the strange personification—
realized in the specific poetic apostrophe form in which the addressee
“you” refers to an aborted fetus. She asks: “For if apostrophe is said to
involve language’s capacity to give life and human form to something
dead or inanimate, what happens when those questions are literal-
ized? What happens when the lyric speaker assumes responsibility for
producing the death in the first place, but without being sure of the
precise degree of human animation that existed in the entity killed?
What is the debate over abortion about, indeed, if not the question of

235
 Afterword

when, precisely, a being assumes a human form?”16 I think this ques-

tion is uncannily reproduced, albeit without a direct lyric addressee,
in the animation of things unknown in their proximity to humanness,
by their uneven agency, by their uncertain capacity to affect, by their
unlikelihood of being “the effector of,” by their uncertain possession
of (human) life. For all its verbal coherence, with the exception of
the interruption of a few pronouns, this book has also been a project
of address, not so easily a diagnosable scene in which a living lyric
speaker addresses a dead being whose animacy was uncertain, but a
scene of engagement in which the “lives” on both sides are beholden
to terms unknown. However you—my reader—have read this, I hope
we have been engaged, you and I, in rediscovering existing forms of
death, or deadness, as much as we have been engaged in the lifely ab-
sence of life and lively inanimation.
In deploying animacy and its forbidding hierarchies as a central
figure in this book, I aimed to move beyond reifying its apparent hier-
archal closures. I endeavored to show how animacy tends to hide its
own contradictions, the transsubstantiations, the transmatterings that
go on underneath, through, and across it: hence, my title Animacies is
importantly plural. One could go so far as to argue that they are what
keep it vital, they are that upon which it depends. However, that being
said, I was interested in animacy in a very significant way for its asser-
tion of hierarchical validity, an assertion that is found peppered across
discourses of not only mainstream thinking but also science itself.
The categorical humanism characteristic of such ontologies is one rea-
son why the call for “new materialisms” has become so urgent. The
new materialisms we can pursue are those that not only diagnose the
“facts” by which humans are not animals are not things (or by which
humans cannot be animals cannot be things), but simultaneously re-
veal such “facts” to be the real uncanny permeating the world we
know. This is the beauty of Ponyo: it forgoes tensions borne of un-
canniness, promising instead an airy and watery cosmology that ani-
macy hierarchies only begrudgingly admit, one in which communing
and transmogrification among unlikely kinds is not exceptional, but
normal and unsurprising. Taking in animacy in this way also suggests
an alternative means, outside of the strictly political or strictly emo-
tional, to identify cross-­affiliations—affinities—among groups as di-
verse as environmentalists, people with autism, social justice activists,
feminists, religious believers in nature’s stewardship, and antiracists, to

236
 The Spill and the Sea

mention just a few. It is also to refuse prescriptive closures around the

possibility of metamorphosis, imaginative or otherwise. Not mimesis
or partial-­morphosis, but the stuff of transformative commitment. I
take to heart the words of the political scientists Noenoe K. Silva and
Jonathan Goldberg-­Hiller when they say that the politics of indige-
nous sovereignty in Hawaii, given the critical relevance of competing
ontologies including animals and landscape objects in which powerful
spirits reside, comes down to questions of metamorphosis.17
These affinities, however, demand fierce sensitivity to their differ-
ences. In my own thinking I return often to Trinh T. Minh-­ha’s ethno-
graphic ethics “not to speak about / Just speak nearby.”18 Well be-
yond rejecting either secularism or spirituality, I wish for an ethics of
care and sensitivity that extends far from humans’ (or the Human’s)
own borders. It is in queer of color and disability/crip circles, neither
of which has enjoyed much immunity from the destructive conse-
quences of contemporary biopolitics, that I have often found blos-
somings of this ethics of care and sensitivity, queerings of objects and
affects accompanied by political revision, reworldings that challenge
the order of things.
Thinking and feeling critically about animacy encourages opening
to the senses of the world, receptivity, vulnerability. My care for a
couch may well have stemmed from what some deem pathology, but
that does not invalidate it as a peculiar kind of care that may at least
truck with the more intensive valence that a couch acquires for one
who cannot afford to replace it, and who cleans it; a dog who likes the
taste of it and licks it; a relatively wealthy person who, due to some
vague charting of proper liberal conduct, tries to give things away be-
fore sending them to the landfill; or a person of whatever neurological
categorization who runs her finger along a slip of fabric ever so gently.
Radical affection does not require intentional politics; and subjectivity
itself, with its attendant danger zones of nationalism, individualism,
whiteness, and rather anti-­animate preference for typology and judg-
ment, need not be core to this account. I seek not to end here with
concluding words about animacy’s ultimate failure or success, only
that it is here and that it has its own regulatory forces which must be
accounted for and met. If we must keep company with such ontologi-
cal closure, it nevertheless remains eminently possible for us to seek
out and affirm the wiliness within.

237
 Notes

Introduction
1. Anatole Broyard describes his engagement with illness as an intoxi-
cation; in opposition to his “sobered” friends, he felt “vivid, multicolored,
sharply drawn.” Broyard, Intoxicated by My Illness, 6.
2. See, especially, Mbembe, “Necropolitics”; and Agamben, Homo Sacer.
3. I refer here to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances,
in which a group is defined not by a core criterion or essential meaning,
but by multiple similarities.
4. Silverstein, “Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity.”
5. Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers, “Animacy in Processing Relative Clauses.”
6. Aristotle, De Anima.
7. Frede, “On Aristotle’s Conception of the Soul,” 94.
8. Dean, A Culture of Stone, 8.
9. Daston, Things That Talk.
10. Within the United States, material culture is examined both within
the social sciences (that is, anthropology) and the humanities (that is, art
history); for an overview, see Kingery, Learning from Things; and Lock and
Farquhar, Beyond the Body Proper. Arjun Appadurai has also edited a book
that considers commodification and culture from a global perspective; Ap-
padurai, The Social Life of Things.
11. Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 2. See also
Colebrook, “On Not Becoming Man,” for a reading of selected feminist
approaches to matter.
12. Bennett, Vibrant Matter.
13. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; Latour, We Have Never Been Mod-
ern; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; and Deleuze and Guattari, A Thou-
sand Plateaus.
14. Shukin, Animal Capital, 11.
 Notes to Chapter One

15. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 35.

16. Foucault, “The Birth of Biopolitics.”
17. Yamamoto, Animacy and Reference, 1.
18. Ibid., 15.
19. “Animacy” conference, Radboud University, 2005.
20. Yamamoto, Animacy and Reference, 180. Emphasis mine.
21. See, for example, Checker, Polluted Promises.
22. Haraway’s oeuvre is central here, as are critically important texts such
as Franklin, Dolly Mixtures; Thompson, Making Parents; and Hayden, When
Nature Goes Public.
23. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 91.
24. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vii.
25. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 119.
26. Foucault, The Order of Things. The original French title was, perhaps
more apt for this book, Les mots et les choses (words and things).
27. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; Love, Feeling Backward; Edelman,
No Future; and Eng, The Feeling of Kinship.
28. See Moore, Kosek, and Pandian, Race, Nature, and the Politics of Differ-
ence.
29. Clare, Exile and Pride; McRuer, Crip Theory.
30. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 149.
31. Snyder and Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability, 195.
32. Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 6–10.
33. Santiago, “The Wily Homosexual.”
34. See, for example, the feminist theorist and poet Susan Griffin’s mem-
oir What Her Body Thought and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals.

1. Language and Mattering Humans

1. Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 185.
2. Ibid.
3. Yamamoto, Animacy and Reference, 1.
4. Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 186.
5. Silverstein, “Hierarchy of Features and Ergativity.”
6. Ibid., 168.
7. Ibid., 164.
8. Ibid., 211.
9. For a summary, see Yamamoto, Animacy and Reference, 24–35. Silver-
stein’s animacy hierarchy depended on a number of contributing features,
each of which could have a binary value, while Yamamoto’s definition of
animacy departs from this approach.
10. Cherry, Animism in Thought and Language.
11. Ibid., 314.
12. Comrie reports that in early Slavonic, the emergence of a new gram-

240
 Notes to Chapter One

matical form “was used only for male, adult, freeborn, healthy humans, i.e.
not for women, children, slaves, or cripples.” Comrie, Language Universals
and Linguistic Typology, 196.
13. Ibid., 62.
14. Yamamoto, Animacy and Reference, 1.
15. Ibid., 199.
16. Ibid., 43.
17. Cherry, Animism in Thought and Language, 217.
18. Langacker, Concept, Image, and Symbol, 248.
19. Yamamoto, Animacy and Reference, 9.
20. Approaches to some indigenous cosmologies are central to this cri-
tique. See, for instance, the exemplary article by Goldberg-­Hiller and Silva
titled “Sharks and Pigs.”
21. Important debates about hate speech and state regulation have been
vital to my own thinking on such topics. In particular, I am indebted to
Brown, States of Injury; Butler, Excitable Speech; and Matsuda, Words That
Wound.
22. WebbCampaign, “Allen’s Listening Tour,” YouTube, August 14, 2006.
The video was recorded by S. R. Sidarth on August 11, 2006.
23. Brown, States of Injury.
24. Matsuda, “Public Response to Racist Speech,” 2320–21.
25. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 113.
26. Ibid., 111–13.
27. Rich, “2006: The Year of the ‘Macaca.’”
28. Scherer, “Salon Person of the Year: S. R. Sidarth.”
29. “Person of the Year: You”; and Grossman, “Citizens of the New Digi-
tal Democracy.”
30. See Clifford, “The Humbling of Jimmy Lai.”
31. The psychometric measure of intelligence dates back to 1917 and is
attributed to the Englishman Sir Francis Galton, who believed in its herita-
bility. Later, French theorist Alfred Binet’s interest in the measurement of
intelligence was less attached to interests in eugenics (he believed in the
possible contribution of nurture to intelligence). However, the taking up
of intelligence psychometrics in the United States revived an investment
in eugenics in its application to the diagnosis of mental retardation in the
Stanford-­Binet test. Stephen Jay Gould popularized criticisms about iq
tests in his The Mismeasure of Man. For an excellent study of the history and
contemporary institutional and philosophical treatment of intellectual dis-
ability, and the relationship to animality that it was perceived and theo-
rized to have, see Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability.
32. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think.
33. Ibid., 46.
34. Riley, Impersonal Passion, 13.
35. Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 46.

241
 Notes to Chapter One

36. Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since
Freud,” 152.
37. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan_ Meets_Onco­
Mouse, 231.
38. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 141, 135.
39. Tsing, Friction, 59, 76.
40. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.
41. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 39.
42. For more on the scientific and State discourses surrounding Schiavo,
see Miller, “‘Reading’ the Body of Terri Schiavo.”
43. Davis, “Life, Death and Biocultural Literacy” and “An End to It All.”
44. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 279.
45. Currently there is some discussion of “inhumanization” in politi-
cal theory, used to avoid the anthropocentrist idealization of the human
in “dehumanization.” See, for example, Feldman, “Mediating Inhumaniza-
tion.”
46. Kafer, “Accessible Futures.”
47. Schweik, The Ugly Laws, 1.
48. Thompson, Making Parents, 265.
49. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, xxii.
50. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”
51. Trinh, “II. The Language of Nativism: Anthropology as a Scientific
Conversation of Man with Man,” in Woman, Native, Other, 47–76.
52. See for instance Linda Williams’s self-­authored Hard Core and edited
anthology Porn Studies.
53. Dworkin, Pornography.
54. Adams and Donovan, Animals and Women. For more positivist
cultural-­feminist and indigenous-­feminist approaches that are less cen-
tered on critiques of negating objectifications, see Hogan, Metzger, and
Peterson, Intimate Nature.
55. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat.
56. MacKinnon, Only Words, 22.
57. Rubin, “Misguided, Dangerous, and Wrong.”
58. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze.”
59. See, for example, Clare, “Gawking, Gaping, Staring,” in The Marrow’s
Telling, 81–90; and Thomson, Staring.
60. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 93.
61. Kafer, “Compulsory Bodies,” 142.
62. Chinn, “Feeling Her Way,” 184.
63. Nussbaum, “Objectification.”
64. Ibid., 251.
65. See Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized. The history of what is
called “colonialism” is still quite overwhelmingly European colonialism.
For a look at a non-­Western colonial discourse—the case of Japanese rule

242
 Notes to Chapter Two

in South Korea—see Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular

Memory.”
66. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
67. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 211.
68. See, for instance, Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property”; and
Stephen Best, The Fugitive’s Properties.
69. For instance, the philosopher Donald Davidson’s influential writings
about mental capacity and speech, as in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective.
70. Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality.
71. Slobin, “From Thought and Language to Thinking for Speaking.”
72. Taub and Galvan, “Patterns of Encoding in asl Motion Descrip-
tions.”
73. See Langacker, Concept, Image, and Symbol and Cognitive Grammar; Fau-
connier and Turner, Mental Spaces; Fauconnier, Mappings in Thought and Lan-
guage.
74. For Butler, the body, if and where it matters, cannot simplistically
precede the speech event. Butler, Bodies That Matter, 8.

2. Queer Animation
1. Freccero, “Queer Times,” 491.
2. Butler, Excitable Speech.
3. Johnson, “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Learned about
Queer I Learned from My Grandmother.”
4. Munt, in her recent book on queer affect, Queer Attachments, advances
connections between racialized religious Irish identity and queer sexuality
in various cultural, temporal, and political locations and proposes that
Irishness serves to falsify British whiteness via queer’s meaning of “fake.”
5. There exist many excurses of such wonderfully productive frictions
among queer’s dictionary senses, particularly with regard to spoiled capital,
strangeness, and oddity; I won’t repeat them here.
6. Burrington, “The Public Square and Citizen Queer.”
7. Before this sexually specific sense was added to the oed, queer schol-
ars were artfully working around an even-­more mystifying array of queer
meanings defined therein than exist now, attempting to plumb an authori-
tative text that had in its turn only circumlocution to offer in both defini-
tion and documentation: for just two examples, see Cleto, “Introduction,”
12–13; Umphrey, “The Trouble with Harry Thaw.”
8. That the Oxford English Dictionary treats “transgenderism” as a “sexual
lifestyle” rather than a gender identification drives home the importance
of thinking majoritarian categories—even queer—through, and not over,
subcultural lives.
9. Without addressing more recent meanings of homosexuality, Philip
Durkin proposes that a word merger, a consolidation of “strange” and

243
 Notes to Chapter Two

“bad” senses to a singular meaning of “strange and bad,” occurred. Durkin,

The Oxford Guide to Etymology, 216–17.
10. Nikki Sullivan discusses this in A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory.
11. Chauncey, Gay New York, 15–16. For other histories, or notes on the
historicity, of queer, see Zwicky, “Two Lavender Issues for Linguists”; and
Butler, Excitable Speech.
12. Chauncey, Gay New York.
13. For an examination of the visual materials and slogans of act up, see
Crimp and Rolston, aids Demo Graphics.
14. See Berlant and Freeman, “Queer Nationality.”
15. See Chasin, Selling Out.
16. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?
17. For scholarship on mobile queer capital in the name of gay and les-
bian tourism and its relationships to nationalism, race, and neoliberalism,
see Puar, “A Transnational Feminist Critique of Queer Tourism”; Alexan-
der, Pedagogies of Crossing, 21–90.
18. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. See also her “To(o) Queer the
Writer,” 208.
19. Anzaldúa, “La Prieta.”
20. De Lauretis, “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.”
21. Robert McRuer makes this point in Crip Theory as part of an extensive
and careful derivation of his understanding of Anzaldúa’s important place
as a crip theorist: “Because the contributions of feminists of color are often
far from central in the origin stories we construct for queer theory, Anzal-
dúa’s 1981 assertion is an important and ongoing challenge to the field or
movement” (37–38).
22. Butler, “Critically Queer.”
23. Duggan, “Making It Perfectly Queer,” 155.
24. Warner, “Introduction,” xxvi.
25. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 9.
26. Cohen, “Gay and the Disappearing [+Female],” 22–24.
27. Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin, 35, 41.
28. Hock, Principles of Historical Linguistics, 300.
29. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 25.
30. This was especially the case in the flurry of political activity sur-
rounding the California Proposition 8 campaign of 2008.
31. For pointedly race-­critical critiques of capital’s consolidation to
whiteness and its implications for queer politics, see Cohen, “Punks, Bull-
daggers, and Welfare Queens.”
32. For critiques and analysis, see, for example, Monroe, “Race, Religion,
and Proposition 8,” 3; Kim, “Marital Discord”; Cannick, “No-­on-­8’s White
Bias.” For a similar argument made about Arizona’s recent marriage con-
tests, see Chávez, “Exploring the Defeat of Arizona’s Marriage Amend-
ment and the Specter of the Immigrant as Queer.”

244
 Notes to Chapter Two

33. Zwicky, “Two Lavender Issues for Linguists,” 22.

34. Brugman, The Story of “Over.”
35. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8.
36. Halperin, Saint Foucault, 62.
37. René Dirven and Marjolyn Verspoor define “concept” simply as “a
person’s idea of what something in the world is like”; categories are struc-
tured concepts that extend beyond individual entities (like proper name
concepts) and thus “slice up reality into relevant units.” Cognitive Exploration
of Language and Linguistics, 13–14.
38. For one example, see Walters, All the Rage.
39. Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance, 13.
40. Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, National School Cli-
mate Survey.
41. Muñoz, Disidentifications.
42. Smitherman, Word from the Mother.
43. Baugh, “The Politicization of Changing Terms of Self-­Reference
among American Slave Descendants.”
44. For more work on queer temporality, see Freccero, Queer/Early/Mod-
ern; Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place; Elizabeth Freeman’s edited spe-
cial issue of glq titled Queer Temporalities; Freeman, Time Binds; Puar, Ter-
rorist Assemblages, 204–22; and Dinshaw, Getting Medieval.
45. For more on category structure, see Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous
Things, 121.
46. “Graded centrality” in relation to prototype structure, with compo-
nents of varying goodness-­of-­exemplar and degree-­of-­membership, is de-
scribed in Croft and Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics, 77–106.
47. Butler, Excitable Speech.
48. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-­Through.”
49. Butler, Excitable Speech, 100.
50. An excellent book considering many largely psychoanalytic ap-
proaches to loss is David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, Loss.
51. See, for example, work on trauma, activism, and affective politics in
Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings.
52. Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics.
53. I am grateful to Eve Sweetser for providing me with this useful
notion of prepackaging.
54. See Leap and Boellstorff, Speaking in Queer Tongues.
55. Duggan, Twilight of Equality; and Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
56. In a book on language and sexuality, Mari Kleinfeld and Noni Warner
do not mention the uptake of a sign or a finger spelling for queer: “Lexical
Variation in the Deaf Community Relating to Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual
Signs.” A YouTube demonstration by a young queer in the United States
called Kailen09 shows that, for some at least, queer has its own sign and is
not just finger spelled: Kailen09, “glbt asl Signs,” July 27, 2009. How-

245
 Notes to Chapter Three

ever, the sign language interpreter Ric Owen notes that this sign does not
circulate widely; it is still taken by some as deeply offensive (the signing in
the YouTube video is hesitant enough to perhaps signify nonfluency in sign
language). Owen also writes that both queer and gay continue to be finger
spelled, and that region, community formation, and age have much to do
with the preferences for which signs are used. Owen, e-­mail communica-
tion.
57. Owen, e-­mail communication.
58. Bacchetta, “Rescaling Transnational Queerdom,” 949.
59. Chou, Tongzhi, 3.
60. Foucault, “Governmentality.”
61. Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language.”
62. Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change.
63. Giffney and Hird, Queering the Non/Human, 4.

3. Queer Animality
1. See Nast, “Loving . . . Whatever: Alienation, Neoliberalism and Pet-­
Love in the Twenty-­First Century,” for a primarily political-­economic
mapping of such contradictions.
2. Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded?”
3. Lippit, Electric Animal, 7.
4. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 73.
5. Agamben, The Open, 24.
6. Ibid., 26. Kelly Oliver points out that Agamben’s evocations of the
“slaughterhouse” and the “machine” of the anthropological machine oddly
seem to leave unaddressed the positions of animals as well as of women.
Oliver, Animal Lessons, 231.
7. Wolfe, “Introduction,” xii.
8. Barrett, Beyond the Brain.
9. Sheets-­Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement.
10. Austin, How to Do Things with Words.
11. Ibid., 14.
12. Ibid., 15.
13. Ibid., 24.
14. Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity.”
15. For instance, as Greta Gaard writes in her carefully argued essay
“Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” “the native feminized other of nature is
not simply eroticized but also queered and animalized, in that any sexual
behavior outside the rigid confines of compulsory heterosexuality be-
comes queer and subhuman” (30).
16. Felman, The Scandal of the Speaking Body, 85.
17. Weightman, The Cat Sat on the Mat.
18. Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 18.

246
 Notes to Chapter Three

19. This example can be compared to an hmo advertisement featuring a

gorilla bride, which Haraway suggests is haunted by an animalized welfare
queen image: Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_ Millenium.FemaleMan_
Meets_OncoMouse, 257–59.
20. Houlbrook, Queer London.
21. See, for instance, Spencer, British Immigration Policy since 1939; and
Walvin, Passage to Britain.
22. Shukin, Animal Capital, 6.
23. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 85.
24. Gates, The Signifying Monkey.
25. Heise, “From Extinction to Electronics.”
26. See Thomson, Freakery, particularly the editor’s introduction.
27. Aristotle, The Politics of Aristotle, xii.
28. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures.
29. Currently in the United States, domesticated pets are often exces-
sively anthropomorphized or treated as accessories; see Serpell, “People in
Disguise.”
30. Lippit, Electric Animal, 1.
31. Schneider, Donna Haraway, 140.
32. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 2. For more on a postcolonial take on ani-
mality, see Ahuja, “Postcolonial Critique in a Multispecies World.”
33. See Foucault, The History of Sexuality; and Mortimer-­Sandilands and
Erickson, Queer Ecologies.
34. Haraway wrote of the dense collocations of race, nature, and women
that came to bear in nineteenth- and twentieth-­century primatology. See
Haraway, Primate Visions and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women.
35. Terry, “Unnatural Acts in Nature,” 152.
36. Thompson, Good Science.
37. Saenz de Rodriguez, Bongiovanni, and Conde de Borrego, “An Epi-
demic of Precocious Development in Puerto Rican Children.”
38. Giffney and Hird, Queering the Non/Human. The exception is J. Jack
Halberstam, “Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation.”
39. Eng, Racial Castration; and Somerville, Queering the Color Line.
40. Marla Carlson attends to the variances that can exist among furries,
as well as a contextualization of furry subcultures in relation to other con-
temporary phenomena that seem to depict the outlines of “humanness.”
Carlson, “Furry Cartography.”
41. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 233.
42. Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian-­Americans.”
43. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.
44. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 13.
45. Giles, The Civilization of China, 63.
46. Shah, Contagious Divides.
47. Many microcephalics, who were the subject of fascination in Euro-

247
 Notes to Chapter Three

pean and U.S. publics, were African American, even though they were
often used to represent apes or exotic creatures from elsewhere. For ex-
ample, William Henry Johnson (1842–1926), known as “Zip the Pinhead”
of P. T. Barnum fame, was billed as a microcephalic, though his medical
status remained uncertain. See Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, for an ex-
cellent study of the historical figuration of disability within the United
States, some of which was constructed within and through the figure of
the “freak.”
48. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 53.
49. Tchen, New York before Chinatown, 206.
50. Recent and distant multiracial dramas alike are shadowed by the
logics of empire; for an insightful study of the interracial negotiations
among Asian Americans, African Americans, and Chicana/os in literature,
see Lee, Urban Triage.
51. Tchen elsewhere has argued that Nast’s apelike Irish representa-
tions showed the clear influence of British animalizing representations of
the Irish, particularly those in the English satirical journal Punch. Tchen,
“Quimbo Appo’s Fear of Fenians.”
52. See, for instance, Chan, Chinese American Masculinities; and Kim, Writ-
ing Manhood in Black and Yellow.
53. Cartright, Determinants of Animal Behavior, 93.
54. De Kosnik, Illegitimate Media. The term techno-­orientalism was popular-
ized by David Morley and Kevin Robins, who used the term to refer pri-
marily to the orientalism theoretically developed by Edward Said rather
than East Asian orientalisms; Morley and Robins, Spaces of Identity.
55. Clegg, Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, 3.
56. These included: The Yellow Claw (1921), The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu
(serial, 1923), The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (1930), The Drums of Fu Manchu
(1940), The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), Vengeance of Fu Manchu (1968), The Castle
of Fu Manchu (1969), and The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980).
57. See Chan, Chinese American Masculinities.
58. See Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore.
59. Nayland Smith to Dr. Petrie. Rohmer, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, 13.
60. Chen, “Dissecting the ‘Devil Doctor,’” 232.
61. See Chin, “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy”; Kim, Writing Man-
hood; and Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet, 56–58. Elaine Kim has called Fu
Manchu “asexual,” in line with broader symbolic emasculations of Asian
men. Kim, Asian American Literature, 8.
62. Baker, “Sloughing the Human.”
63. Eng, Racial Castration.
64. Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race, 6.
65. For more on the spectacle of Asian trans bodies, see Chen, “Every-
where Archives.”
66. Delonas, op-­ed cartoon. For analysis of racialized images, including

248
 Notes to Chapter Four

this one in the wake of U.S. President Barack Obama’s election, see Apel,
“Just Joking?”
67. Tsao, Schweers, Moeller, and Freiwald, “Patches of Face-­Selective
Cortex in the Macaque Frontal Lobe.”
68. “Chimp Victim Reveals Face on Oprah.”
69. The activist group “Not Dead Yet” opposes euthanasia in large part
because of its uncritical conflation of disability with lives less worth living.
70. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, 149–
214.
71. For two works on race in relation to Shelley’s Frankenstein, see Mal­
chow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-­Century Britain; Young, Black Fran­
kenstein.

4. Animals, Sex, Transsubstantiation

1. For two other studies on the intersection of transness and animals and
animality, see Hansen, “Humans, Horses, and Hormones”; and Hayward,
“Lessons from a Starfish.”
2. Butler, Bodies That Matter.
3. In addition to Donna Haraway’s corpus, some exemplary texts include
Thompson, “When Elephants Stand In for Competing Philosophies of Na-
ture”; Anderson, “The Beast Within”; Lutz and Collins, Reading National
Geographic; and Shukin, Animal Capital.
4. Franklin, “The Cyborg Embryo.”
5. Thompson, Making Parents.
6. Philo and Wilbert, “Introduction.”
7. Hird, “Animal Transex.”
8. See Zeng, “China Enters Dog-­Eat-­Dog Pet Industry.”
9. Patton, “Stealth Bombers of Desire.”
10. Wines, “Once Banned, Dogs Reflect China’s Rise.”
11. Ibid.
12. For a look at the gendered component of Chinese economics, see
Chan, Gender and Chinese Development; Rofel, Desiring China.
13. Nast, “Critical Pet Studies?”
14. Nast, “Loving . . . Whatever,” 306, 320.
15. Wines, “Once Banned, Dogs Reflect China’s Rise.”
16. From the website Love That Cat, www.lovethatcat.spayneuter.html.
17. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.”
18. Kluchin, Fit to Be Tied; Stubblefield, “Beyond the Pale.”
19. For work that considers the queer-­trans relationship, see Stryker,
“Transgender Studies”; and Prosser, Second Skins.
20. Sullivan also discusses nonmainstream body modification such as tat-
tooing, piercing, and cosmetic surgery; see Sullivan, “Transmogrification.”
21. Hird, “Animal Transex,” 35–50.

249
 Notes to Chapter Four

22. Ibid., 37.

23. Stryker, Currah, and Moore, “Introduction,” 11.
24. Bersani, “Sexuality and Aesthetics.”
25. Freud, “Fetishism,” 154.
26. Williams, Hard Core, 34–57.
27. Ibid., 93–119.
28. Stevens, “Deadly Youth.”
29. Turim, The Films of Oshima Nagisa, 210.
30. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 123.
31. Creed, “A Darwinian Love Story.”
32. Laqueur, Making Sex, 18. For studies of Victorian-­era interests in non-
human animals with significant treatment of visual representation, see the
work of Harriet Ritvo, particularly The Animal Estate and The Platypus and the
Mermaid.
33. Tropes of animality and primitivism in colonial spaces have been
widely written about; for an overview of these tropes in visual cultures,
see Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism.
34. Ian Condry describes tensions between Japanese self-­identifications
as monoracial and long-­standing discrimination against Japanese of Korean
heritage. Condry, “Yellow B-­Boys, Black Culture, and Hip-­Hop in Japan,”
657–59. See also Steen, Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and
American Theatre; and Raphael-­Hernandez and Steen, Afro Asian Encounters.
35. For more on blackface in contemporary Japan, see Wood, “The Yel-
low Negro”; Cornyetz, “Fetishizing Blackness”; and Russell, “Consuming
Passions.”
36. Lippit, “The Films of Oshima Nagisa,” 160.
37. However, Paul Coates sees Oshima’s movies as resistant to any single
lens of interpretation, preferring to discuss them as contradictory chal-
lenges to the viewer’s sense of coherence; Coates, “Repetition and Contra-
diction in the Films of Oshima.”
38. Xu Bing, personal conversation.
39. See Silbergeld and Ching, Persistence-­Transformation.
40. Xu Bing, “A Case Study of Transference.”
41. Lin, “Globalism or Nationalism?”
42. Quoted in Barboza, “Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China.”
43. Freccero, “Les chats de Derrida.”
44. This is an iterativity whose central importance, particularly for
heteronormativity, has been theorized by Butler. In the wake of Austin,
Butler performs a Foucauldian reading on the entwined discursive lives of
gender, sex, and the body, pointing to the iterativity that is necessary for
the maintenance of a coherent normativity, and the likely fault lines that
must be exposed. See Butler, Gender Trouble.
45. David Eng’s Racial Castration offers a cogent psychoanalytic study
of the vexed sexualization of the Asian American male. See also Richard

250
 Notes to Chapter Five

Fung’s essay “Looking for My Penis,” in which, against the popular gay
and lesbian political motto “we are everywhere,” he considers the relative
paucity of Asians, and Asian sexuality in visual, particularly video, repre-
sentation.
46. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
47. Fuchs, “Michael Jackson’s Penis,” 17.
48. Jackson, interview.
49. Lauren Berlant comments on the panther in the video, suggesting
that it represents Jackson’s “amnesiac optimism or the absolute falseness
of the utopian performative ‘It don’t matter if you’re black or white.’” The
Queen of America Goes to Washington City, 213.
50. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
51. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-­Oedipus, 9; A Thousand Plateaus.
52. The idea that each organ has a discrete function is contradicted by
views that the systems of the body are in fact interdependent and in con-
stant communicative flux. In neurobiology, the actual human body ap-
proaches the theoretical “body without organs” as it moves away from a
regularized, systemic representation, both in the multifunctionality of a
given organ and the increasing numbers of communicative relationships
among “organs” that converge to produce behavioral or emotional appear-
ances or effects (for example, neurophysiological constructs are under-
stood to interact with bodily hormone systems in new ways that influence
the measurable emotionality of a body).
53. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures.
54. Hayward, “More Lessons from a Starfish.”
55. Ibid., 81.
56. McRuer, Crip Theory.
57. Basquin, “Range.”
58. Basquin, “A Site for Queer Reproduction.” See also Alfonso, “Nostal-
gia and Masculinities in Bill Basquin’s Range.”
59. See Basquin’s website: http://www.billbasquin.com/catalog.0.html
.0.html.

5. Lead’s Racial Matters

1. I do not wish to fully privilege available medical evidence when I
note that, to the degree that lead toxicity was medicalized, there were no
known reports of poisoning from the specific toys recalled. It is the re-
lationship between the high levels of panic and low levels of documented
poisoning that points to a disproportionate response. I caution, however,
that medically documented poisoning can often be an unreliable criterion,
since documentation levels for testing may be calibrated to detect acute,
rather than chronic, levels of poisoning.
2. See, for example, “Mattel Issues New Massive China Toy Recall.”

251
 Notes to Chapter Five

3. Story, “Lead Paint Prompts Mattel to Recall 967,000 Toys.”

4. Lipton and Barboza, “As More Toys Are Recalled, Trail Ends in China.”
5. “New Worries over Lead.”
6. See the essays in the excellent book edited by Evelyn Nakano Glenn,
Shades of Difference, for a variety of approaches to the complex mappings
between colorism and racism.
7. On April 29, 2011, the Illinois company rc2 was acquired by the Japa-
nese toy-­making corporation Tomy Company, Ltd.
8. Kang’s essay focuses on the Asian female body’s appropriation and de-
contextualized uptake for symbolic representation of transnational work-
ing bodies. Kang, “Si(gh)ting Asian/American Women as Transnational
Labor.”
9. See Jain, Injury, for a discussion of injury law and “American injury
culture” from cultural anthropology and legal studies perspectives.
10. Lei, Environmental Activism in China; Tilt, The Struggle for Sustainability
in Rural China.
11. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 168.
12. “wto: China Overtakes U.S. in Exports; Asian Nation Set to Become
the World’s Biggest Exporter by 2008.”
13. Lague, “China Output Not a Threat, Officials Say.”
14. Lammers, “What to Do When Everything Is ‘Made in China?’”
15. Such extravagant and rapid displacements in mainstream media do
not, however, reflect the continued attention to this issue among envi-
ronmental justice activists. Recently, the activist and artist Mel Chin has
embarked on a campaign to raise awareness about lead levels in lower-­
income, historically black neighborhoods in post-­Katrina New Orleans;
for more on his “Operation Paydirt” project, see Brookhardt, “Mel Chin’s
Operation Paydirt Aims to Get the Lead Out of New Orleans’ Inner City
Neighborhoods.”
16. However, many scholars are taking more sensitive views to the per-
meability of national borders when it comes to industrial pollutants, in-
cluding environmental studies such as Pulido, Environmentalism and Eco-
nomic Justice: Two Chicano Studies in the Southwest.
17. Beck, Risk Society, 23.
18. For this phrasing I am indebted to Gabriele Schwab, who was re-
sponding to my talk at University of California, Irvine, on this topic on
October 30, 2009.
19. Wald, Contagious. In the case of sars, for instance, Gwen D’Arcangelis
writes how microbial modes of transmission were explained by way of
news media images and texts that placed people in proximity to nonhuman
animals, linking these to U.S. imperialism in relation to China. See D’Arc-
angelis, “Chinese Chickens, Ducks, Pigs and Humans, and the Techno-
scientific Discourses of Global U.S. Empire.”
20. Povinelli, The Empire of Love, 77.

252
 Notes to Chapter Five

21. Shah, Contagious Divides.

22. A phrase from Allen S. Williams, The Demon of the Orient and His Satel-
lite Fiends of the Joint: Our Opium Smokers as They Are in Tartar Hells and Ameri-
can Paradises (1883), quoted in Shah, Contagious Divides, 54.
23. The Bioterrorism Act was enacted in 2002. According to Andrew
Lakoff, concerns about bioterrorism merged with existing disease out-
breaks in national security discourses in the late 1990s. Lakoff, “National
Security and the Changing Object of Public Health.”
24. A somewhat different argument is made by Marion Nestle, who
writes about concerns over food safety and links them to rhetoric about
bioterrorism; Nestle, Safe Food.
25. Austen, “Lead in Children’s Toys Exceeds Limit, Magazine Says.”
26. I am reminded here of Jake Kosek’s articulation of another invisible
threat, radiation near nuclear sites, and the fungibility it portends, precisely
because it must be imagined: “Radiation is a strange beast. It is undetect-
able by our very senses. . . . Living next to a deeply secretive, historically
deceptive nuclear research complex that produces a highly volatile, mo-
bile, odorless, tasteless, invisible substance that is unimaginably enduring
and deadly in its toxicity blurs the traditional boundaries between material
and imaginary. The very essence of an object changes meanings: a dust
cloud from the east, smoke from Los Alamos, firewood, drinking water,
an elk steak, all become haunted by possibilities of what is not perceptively
present but always a threat. What makes sense in a context where senses are
useless?” Kosek, Understories, 258–59.
27. Adelaide Now Blog, “Why Is China Poisoning Our Babies?” This
blog is by an Australian writer. Other ambiguous and not so ambiguous
titles included the conservative website Americans Working Together, who
posted an article called “Greed, China Poisoning Our Children with Lead.”
28. Harris, “Heparin Contamination May Have Been Deliberate, F.D.A.
Says.”
29. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
30. For more accounts of the rhetorical strategies of environmental
justice activism, see Sze, Noxious New York; Calpotura and Sen, “pueblo
Fights Lead Poisoning.” For general approaches to environmental justice,
see Bullard, The Quest for Environmental Justice.
31. Wayne, “The Enemy at Home,” 1. This was the print title; the online
version is titled “Thousands of Homeowners Cite Drywall for Ills.”
32. Chen, “Chinese Toy Terror.” See also Cottle, “Toy Terror.”
33. See, for example, Nash, “Fruits of Ill Health,” and the film Maquilopo-
lis, which refers to the poisoning of the environment in which maquila-
doras are located as well as of the maquiladora workers’ bodies themselves.
34. Pediatric mercury-­laden vaccines serve as one example of such prac-
tices. The fda and cdc bought up surpluses of thimerosal-­preserved chil-
dren’s vaccines banned in the United States, then oversaw their exportation

253
 Notes to Chapter Five

to countries outside of the United States. On October 15, 2008, President

Bush signed into law the Mercury Export Ban, which prohibits by 2013 the
export of elemental mercury from the United States. The United States has
been a top source of mercury distribution throughout the world, particu-
larly by selling its stores of surplus mercury to industrializing countries.
The ban does not however address the continuing export of electronic
wastes (which contain lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic chemicals)
to industrializing countries for resource mining, which results in highly
toxic exposures.
35. Cheri Lucas Jennings and Bruce Jennings critique the shallow, still
racist remedies inherent in “organic” and “sustainable” agricultural practice
and policy developments. Jennings and Jennings, “Green Fields/Brown
Skin,” 180.
36. United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Recall Release
#08–247, April 10, 2008.
37. For more on the opposition between rural and metropolis and this
divide’s organizations based on class and sex, see Herring, Another Country.
38. Jennings, “Thomas the Tank Engine Toys Recalled Because of Lead
Hazard.”
39. David Eng discusses a photograph commemorating the construction
of Western railroads that, through omission, performs the erasure of Chi-
nese labor in the building of the railroads. He uses Walter Benjamin’s con-
siderations of history, temporality, and the photograph to perform a liter-
ary analysis of the rhetorical invisibilization of Asian American presence,
building an argument about “racial melancholia” in the United States. Eng,
Racial Castration.
40. There has been some popular attention to the conditions of Chinese
labor; for example, Chang, Factory Girls, and the documentary directed by
Micha Peled, China Blue, on the exploitive living and working conditions
of young female Chinese workers who have come to the city to make blue
jeans.
41. There are some exceptions. Among individual public responses to
either professional journalism or blogged expressions of the toxicity of
lead toys and the toxicity of Chinese products, one can find alerts to the
more complex, sometimes imperial relationships between United States
and transnational corporate interests, U.S. consumer interests, the Chinese
government, and Chinese transnationalized labor. No mainstream publi-
cation to my knowledge, however, for all the complexity it might have
included in its coverage, has not also symptomatically either assisted in
retreating to occasional gestures of alarmism or conflations of biosecurity
threats with the catch-­all nomination of “China.”
42. For a study of situations in which the employers of childcare are
themselves people of color, see Qayum and Ray, “Traveling Cultures of
Servitude.”

254
 Notes to Chapter Five

43. Glenn, Forced to Care, 2. Glenn’s book historicizes the long-­standing

racialization, gendering, and class structuring of all kinds of care work
within the United States.
44. Briggs, “Foreign and Domestic.”
45. Chang, Disposable Domestics.
46. Clough, Autoaffection.
47. See also Chun, Control and Freedom.
48. The first iq measure in the United States was broadly and inaccu-
rately adapted from the French Simon-­Binet scale by H. H. Goddard.
Goddard believed that intelligence was inborn and could not be altered
environmentally; the iq measure factored prominently in his and others’
eugenicist efforts. Since then, several biases inherent in the test have been
recognized, including the fact that iq can dramatically change in relation
to one’s environment.
49. See Carter, The Heart of Whiteness. Carter discusses neurasthenia diag-
noses of men and their associations with weakness and white vulnerability
in general. Susan Schweik notes that neurasthenia was gendered as female
and “turns out to be high-­class mendicancy,” illustrating to me the ease
of alteration between one’s vulnerability to disability and being disabled.
Schweik, The Ugly Laws, 80.
50. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 206.
51. See Roig-­Franzia, “Probe Opens on Study Tied to Johns Hopkins.”
52. I heard this story when it aired in 2007 and immediately understood
it as a symptom of willful forgetting in light of “Chinese lead.” However,
I am unable to find the exact citation since not all npr programs are tran-
scribed and archived.
53. “The Living Legacy of Lead.”
54. Paul Gilroy implicitly arouses the specter of such a “savage” body
when he critiques the naively rehabilitative reading of the contained
and fluid image of the black athlete in Leni Riefenstahl’s filming of Jesse
Owens: “her superficially benign recognition of black excellence in physi-
cality need not be any repudiation of raciological theory. In this world
of overdetermined racial signs, an outstandingly good but temperamental
natural athlete is exactly what we would expect a savage African to be-
come.” Gilroy, Against Race, 173.
55. Davis, “Masked Racism.”
56. Lott, Love and Theft, 116.
57. In a chapter called “Animatedness,” Sianne Ngai suggests the legacy
of blackface minstrelsy haunts modern-­day animation shows centering on
black life, such as The PJ’s; what Lott reads as Dickens’s textual “jump-­cuts”
in describing minstrel dance might be found in the bodily displacements
and exaggerations of the stop-­motion sequencing of the PJ’s characters.
Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 89–125.
58. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” reads The United Negro Col-

255
 Notes to Chapter Six

lege Fund’s campaign to further blacks’ access to education. Dan Quayle’s

perversion of this slogan, “What a terrible thing it is to lose one’s mind,”
suggests what fantasies about blackness might underlie benevolent white
liberal representations.
59. I thank Don Romesburg for first getting me to indulge in this sensory
fantasy.
60. “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends Recall.”
61. See the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s webpage on
lead and toys, http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/tips/toys.htm.
62. See Bruhm and Hurley, Curiouser; and Stockton, The Queer Child.
63. McRuer, Crip Theory, 88–89.
64. See, for instance, the website Lead in Mexican Candy, www.leadin
mexicancandy.com.

6. Following Mercurial Affect

1. Buell, “Toxic Discourse,” 645.
2. For one such account and analysis, see Steingraber, Living Downstream.
3. Foucault, The Order of Things.
4. cnn Political Ticker, “Democratic Governor Candidate: Health Care
Reform Could Be ‘Toxic’ in 2010.”
5. Britney Spears’s Grammy-­winning hit song, “Toxic” (from the album
In the Zone, 2003).
6. For a small sample of mass market books that use this metaphor (in
categories from personal self-­help to business), consider Brasher, Toxic Re-
lationships: How to Regain Lost Power in Your Relationship; Glass, Toxic People:
10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable; and Sue, Toxic
People: Decontaminate People at Work without Using Weapons.
7. Kusy and Holloway, Toxic Workplace! Managing Toxic Personalities and Their
Systems of Power, 3–4.
8. Wency Leung cites an interview with the author in an overview of the
book. Leung, “How to Survive a Toxic Workplace.”
9. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis.
10. Davidson, “Universal Design.”
11. Butler, Bodies That Matter.
12. Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs.”
13. Mbembe, “Necropolitics” and On the Postcolony.
14. Agamben, Homo Sacer.
15. Enstad, “Toxicity and the Consuming Subject,” 57–58.
16. Donna Haraway has written of immune systems’ constitution by bio-
political brokerages between “us” and “them.” Haraway, “The Biopolitics
of Postmodern Bodies” and “The Promises of Monsters.”
17. Cohen, A Body Worth Defending.
18. Martin, Flexible Bodies, 38.

256
 Notes to Chapter Six

19. Esposito, Bios.

20. Edelman, No Future, 2.
21. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
22. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
23. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings.
24. Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” 3.
25. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 185–89.
26. For complexities of passing and disclosure, see Samuels, “My Body,
My Closet”; and Robert McRuer’s chapter “Coming Out Crip” in Crip
Theory, 33–76.
27. Siebers, Disability Theory, 101–8. On compulsory able-­bodiedness in
relation to queer-­crip perspectives, see McRuer, Crip Theory; Kafer, “Com-
pulsory Bodies”; Clare, Exile and Pride.
28. The sociologist Erving Goffman’s Stigma considers visible disability,
particularly disfigurement, as a kind of social stigma and the ways in which
it is managed in conversation.
29. I am texturing an analysis of toxicity here to consider negatively
racialized bodies as themselves “toxic bodies.” See, for instance, the oft-­
cited scene from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks in which the narrator con-
siders his racialized objectification by a white child and by other whites.
30. Terry, “Objectum-­Sexuality”; and Katayama, “Love in 2-d.”
31. Thanks to Jennifer Terry for this suggestion.
32. Alaimo, Bodily Natures. This book rethinks agency through the ma-
teriality of bodies affected by environments. Alaimo considers Multiple
Chemical Sensitivity as a phenomenon not easily captured by models of
environmental justice and theorizes its relation to the body’s resolutely
inseparable material environment. Other ecofeminist perspectives include
Gaard, Ecofeminism.
33. Rose, The Politics of Life Itself.
34. Clarkson, “Metal Toxicity in the Central Nervous System,” 60.
35. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 272–73.
36. Katherine Young, for instance, writes about the radical unconcern of
Deleuze and Guattari for actual animals in their formulation of “becoming-­
animal.” See her “Deleuze and Guattari: The Animal Question.”
37. For an anthology theorizing violence in relation to a multiplicity of
bodies (and landscapes), see Peluso and Watts, Violent Environments.
38. LaDuke, “Akwesasne: Mohawk Mother’s Milk and pcbs.”
39. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 54.
40. Plotz, “Can the Sofa Speak? A Look at Thing Theory.” The essay’s
titular citation of Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay about human subalternity
within the Indian context, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” is also never revis-
ited.
41. Tuana, “Viscous Porosity,” 199–200.
42. Three recent trade books include: Olmstead and Blaxill, The Age of

257
 Notes to Chapter Six

Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Man-­Made Epidemic; Kirby, Evidence of Harm:

Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy; and High-
tower, Diagnosis Mercury: Money, Politics and Poison.
43. Fleischman, “Language and Medicine.”
44. Grandin, Animals in Translation.
45. Baggs, “In My Language.”
46. See chapter 5, titled “The Face of the Beast,” in Carlson, The Faces of
Intellectual Disability, 131–61.
47. Cvetkovich, “Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory,” 357.
48. McRuer and Wilkerson, “Introduction,” 14.
49. If Baggs has been to any degree a controversial figure, the negative
attention seems to be represented much more among non-­disabled autism
caregivers and nonautistic experts on autism (who say categorically, for in-
stance, that she is so good with language that she can’t possibly be autistic)
than among autistics. Thanks to Eli Clare for discussing this with me.
50. In nominating this a crip-­theoretical text, I am consciously calling
up Robert McRuer’s articulation of a crip theory that generates “ability
trouble” without positivistic or purely identitarian completion. He looks
for “crip actors who . . . will exacerbate, in more productive ways, the crisis
of authority that currently besets heterosexual/able-­bodied norms” (Crip
Theory, 31).
51. Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move?, 27–28.
52. See the novel by Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues. For a reading of
being stone in relation to trans identifications, see Halberstam, Female Mas-
culinity.
53. Clare, “Stones in My Pocket, Stones in My Heart,” Exile and Pride,
143–60. For more on what I read as the affects of gendered butchness in re-
lation to illness, particularly cancer discourses, see Jain, “Cancer Butch.”
54. Clare, Exile and Pride, 156.
55. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 111–40.
56. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling; Muñoz, Disidentifications.
57. Christine Bacareza Balance, for instance, juxtaposes public health’s
indictment of queer Filipino bodies with disproportionately high hiv rates
as “toxic subjects” with the possibility of shared queer Filipino American
drug trips as pleasurable and intimate counterpublics. Balance, “On Drugs.”
58. Thinking more specifically about the ethical and affective politics of
geopolitical strife, in particular those of war, Judith Butler writes of vul-
nerability as a given condition, a condition that might inform a radically
changed ethics were it to be acknowledged. See, for example, Precarious
Life.
59. Kafer, “Accessible Futures.”
60. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place.
61. Eng, Racial Castration, 4–13.
62. Freeman, Time Binds; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval, 1–54.

258
 Notes to Afterword

63. Love, Feeling Backward, 3.

64. Rodríguez is drawing here on work by Nguyen Tan Hoang that ar-
ticulates a critical possibility in racialized bottoming. See Rodríguez,
“Queer Sociality and Sexual Fantasies,” 338. See also Scott, Extravagant Ab-
jection.
65. Love, Feeling Backward, 3.
66. Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness.

Afterword
1. Allen, interview with Jeffrey Brown.
2. For more on the idea of “shock therapy” in contemporary capitalist
formations, see Klein, The Shock Doctrine.
3. Exclusive economic “sea zones” are defined under the United Nations
Convention on the Law of the Sea (unclos), developed over several de-
cades of the twentieth century. unclos took effect in 1994 and has legal
force for the approximately 160 signees.
4. Such a state-­facilitated affect of new security would be in close com-
pany with the affective economy of fear about which Sara Ahmed writes
in “Affective Economies.”
5. Miyazaki, The Art of Ponyo, 11.
6. Ibid.
7. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.
8. Miyazaki, The Art of Ponyo, 116.
9. Lyrics: Wakako Kaku and Hayao Miyazaki; music composition and ar-
rangement: Joe Hisaishi; performance: Masako Hayashi; translation: Rieko
Izutsu-­Vajirasarn. Reported in Miyazaki, The Art of Ponyo, 268.
10. Freeman, Time Binds.
11. I am thinking here of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and of newer
work that departs from or reworks his fundamental insight about the gen-
erativity of the Middle Passage. For recent queer-­theory work, see Alex-
ander, Pedagogies of Crossing; and Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic.”
12. Alexander, “Race, Gender, and Sexuality.”
13. See, for example, Dean, A Culture of Stone; Parkes, “The Awareness of
Rock.”
14. Savarese, “More Than a Thing to Ignore.” In a discussion of learning
her tribe’s language, Potowatomi, and its revelation of Anishinaabe (a First
Nations tribal grouping) cosmology, the botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer
uses stones, deemed animate in Potawatomi, to contrast with inanimate,
generally human-­made objects. “Of an inanimate being like a table we say,
‘What is it?’ And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must
say ‘Who is it?’ And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple he is.” Kimmerer, “Learning
the Grammar of Animacy,” 174.

259
 Notes to Afterword

15. Taylor, “Beasts of Burden,” 191–92.

16. Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 32.
17. Silva and Goldberg-­Hiller, “Taking Indigenous Cosmologies Seri-
ously.”
18. Reassemblage; Trinh and Chen, “Speaking Nearby.”

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282
 Index
abject subjects: animacy and,
40–42; study of, 219–21
abortion, 235–36
Abotex Lead Inspector, 160–62,
172
academia: lexical acts and queer
theory in, 68–70; reclamation of
queer in, 63–67
accusative languages, animacy and,
25–27
Act Up, 61–63
adjectival queerness, 75–82
Adventures of Fu Manchu, The (dvd
collection), 119–21
Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and
the Crisis of Representation (Quay-
son), 220–21
affective economies, animacy and,
12
affect studies: animacy hierarchies
and, 30; Gulf of Mexico oil spill
and, 227; inanimate objects and,
214–21; stone butchness and,
216–21; toxicity and dynamics
of, 189–92, 203–6
African Americans: black termi-
nology reclamation and, 65–67,
73, 79–82; enfranchisement
of, 108, 111, 113; lead poison-
ing among children of, 166–68,
180–88, 252n15; nominalization
of, 73–75; queer lexicology and
vernacular of, 59–63, 83–84; ver-
nacular in literature of, 98
Agamben, Giorgio, 1, 92, 193,
246n6
Ahmed, Sara, 12, 259n4
aids crisis: life-­death boundaries
and, 196; queer lexicological
evolution and, 61–63; queer time
concepts and, 218–19
“Akwesasne: Mohawk Mother’s
Milk and pcbs,” 208
Alaimo, Stacy, 204, 257n32
Alexander, Jacqui, 234
Allen, George, 13–14, 31–35, 39–40,
51, 53–55
Allen, Thad, 223–26
American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, 60
American Sign Language (asl),
52–55, 81–82
animacy theory: basic principles
of, 102–6; boundaries of life
and death and, 1–2, 4–7; defi-
nition of, 2–3; dehumanization
and objectification and, 42–50;
environmental toxins and, 16;
 Index
animacy theory (continued)
film animation and, 228–32; Fu
Manchu imagery and, 115–21;
Gulf of Mexico oil spill and,
223–27; hierarchy of (see hier-
archy of animacy); inanimate
subjects and animate objects in,
203–6; interdisciplinary research
concerning, 17–20; lead tox-
icity and, 159–60, 187–88; lexical
origins of, 3–4; linguistic con-
text for, 4–5, 8–12, 23–30; metals
and toxicity and, 15–16; oil spills
and, 16; queer theory and, 11–12,
14, 17–20, 57–58, 70–75, 82–85,
233–37; thought and cognition
and, 51–55; toxicity effects and,
190; visual cultures and, 106–15;
words and, 13–14
Animal Capital (Shukin), 6
animality: animacy and, 14–15;
animal-­human boundaries and,
127–30; Austin’s theory of lan-
guage and, 90, 93–98; body with-
out organs and, 152–55; colo-
nialism and, 96–98; in “Cultural
Animal” art installation, 143–48;
cultural articulation of, 122–23;
Fu Manchu imagery and, 116–21;
genitalia erasure and, 135–37, 140–
43, 151–55; hierarchy of animacy
and, 89–90; Marx’s dehumaniza-
tion of labor and, 45–50; Michael
Jackson’s use of, 149–50; neuter-
ing and, 130–35; objectification
and dehumanization and, 44–50;
queer theory and, 102–15, 121;
racial politics of, 34–35, 104–15;
theories of, 98–102; transness and,
127–30, 135–37; transsubstantia-
tion and, 151–55; Travis incident
and, 122–26
animal language, linguistic theory
and, 90–93
animate theories, queer lexicology
and, 72–75
284
“Animation, Apostrophe, and
Abortion” ( Johnson), 235–36
Anishinaabe tribal group, 214,
259n14
anthropomorphism: lead panic
over toy imports and, 161–62; pet
ownership and, 105–6, 247n29
antiessentialism, queer politics and,
69–70
Anti-­Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia (Deleuze and Guattari),
151–55
Antony and the Johnsons (band),
153
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 63–64, 244n21
Aristotle, 4–5, 9; on language, 91;
on slavery, 100, 106; soul-­less
body concept of, 41
Asian American studies: animal-­
human boundaries and, 130–35;
animality in, 90; Chinese immi-
grant labor and, 176–77, 254n39;
Fu Manchu imagery and, 115–21,
250–51n45; race concepts in,
106–15
Asperger’s syndrome. See autism,
discourse on disability and
assimilation, queer theory termi-
nology and, 66–67
assisted reproductive technology,
objectification and dehumaniza-
tion in, 44
Austin, J. L., 14–15, 17, 85, 90,
93–98, 147–48, 152
autism, discourse on disability and,
211–21, 258n49
Awdry, Wilbert, 163
Bacchetta, Paola, 83
Baggs, Amanda M., 211, 213–15,
258n49
Balance, Christine Bacareza,
258n57
Barad, Karen, 5
bdsm subculture, animacy and,
105–6
 Index

bees, animated films of, 228–29 7–9; immunity nationalism and

Benjamin, Walter, 254n39 forms of, 193–95; toxicity effects
Bennett, Jane, 5–7, 11, 41–42 in, 189–90, 201–3, 212–21; with-
Berlant, Laura, 197, 250n49 out organs, 151–55, 251n52
Bernshoff, Harry, 117 Body Worth Defending, A (Cohen),
Bhabha, Homi, 97, 126, 140–41 194–95
Binet, Alfred, 241n31, 255n48 boomerang effect, lead-­based toy
biopolitics: animacy hierarchies imports and, 167
and, 127–30; animal-­human Borderlands/La Frontera: The New
boundaries and, 128–30; con- Mestiza (Anzaldúa), 63
cepts of life and death and, 6; British Nationality Act, 97
Gulf of Mexico oil spill and, British Petroleum (bp), Gulf of
223–27; hierarchy of animacy Mexico oil spill and, 223–27
and, 84–85; immunity nation- Burlingame treaty, 111–13
alism and, 192–95, 256n16; lead Butler, Judith, 53, 58–59, 64–65, 78,
panic over Chinese toy imports 128, 250n44, 258n58
and, 167–88; optimized life para-
cannibalization, animality and, 126
digm and, 196; pet ownership
capitalism: lead panic over Chinese
restrictions and, 133–35; role of
toy imports as threat to, 173–88;
metaphor in, 190
objectification and dehumaniza-
biosecurity threat, lead panic over
tion in, 45–50; queer lexicology
Chinese toy imports as, 171–88,
and, 62–63; toxicity and, 194–95
253n27
Carlson, Licia, 214–15
bioterrorism imagery, lead panic
Carlson, Marla, 105–6, 247n40
over Chinese toy imports and,
Carter, Julian B., 181, 255n49
171–88, 253n23
castration: of animals, 154–55;
bird flu outbreak, as biosecurity
racialized body without organs
threat, 168–72
and, 152–55; transmogrification
black, lexicological reclamation of
and, 148–50
term, 65–66, 73, 80–82
Centers for Disease Control and
Black Atlantic, The (Gilroy), 259n11
Prevention, 184–85
blackface minstrelsy, 143, 184,
Chauncey, George, 61
255n57
Cherry, John, 26–27, 29–30
“Black or White” (video), 149–50
childcare work, predominance of
black panther, Michael Jackson’s
immigrants in, 177
use of, 149–50, 251n49
child development, mercury tox-
Black Panther Party, 149–50
icity and, 211–21
Black Power movement, 66, 149–
China: dog-­eating ban proposals
50
in, 131; Fu Manchu imagery pro-
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon),
tested by, 116–21; immigration
148, 257n29
to U.S. from, 107–15, 176–77,
Blaine, James G., 111–14
254n39; lead toys imported from,
Bob the Builder toy system, 163
15–16, 159–88; pet ownership in,
Bodies That Matter (Butler), 193
130–35
Bodily Natures (Alaimo), 257n32
China Blue (film), 254n40
body: animacy and coherence of,

285
 Index
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, 108
Chinese language, queer lexicol-
ogy and, 81–83
Chinn, Sarah, 49
Chou Wah-­shan, 83
Civilization of China, The (Giles),
108
Clare, Eli, 17, 216–17
class politics: in Hillbilly Teeth toy,
174–76; lead panic over Chi-
nese toy imports and, 166–88;
lead toxicity studies and, 181–88;
queer lexicology and, 62–63;
Thomas & Friends toy series
incidents and, 175–88
Clough, Patricia, 178
cognitive ability: lead toxicity as
threat to, 174–88; speciesism and,
214–15
cognitive grammar theory, 52
cognitive linguistics: conceptual
integration theory and, 36–38;
configuration of animacy and,
30–35; queer grammars of for-
getting and, 78–82; thought and,
51–55
Cohen, Cathy, 134–35
Cohen, Ed, 194–95
collective body, queer lexicology
and concept of, 73–75
colonialism: animality and, 126,
250n33; anti-­immigration legis-
lation and, 96–98; fetishism and,
140; in Max, mon amour, 142–43;
non-­Western colonial discourse,
242n65; objectification and de-
humanization in work of, 44–50
color, graded valuations of, 162,
252n6
commodification: objectification
and dehumanization and, 45–50;
toxicity and, 194–95
Commonwealth Immigrants Act
of 1962, 97
community identity, queer theory
and, 68–70
286
“Compulsory Bodies: Reflections
on Heterosexuality and Able-­
Bodiedness” (Kafer), 48
computer-­generated image (cgi)
technologies, 229
Comrie, Bernard, 23, 28, 30, 240–
41n12
conceptual integration theory, ani-
macy and, 36–38
consumerism, queer lexicology
and, 62–63
Consumer Product Safety Com-
mission, 160, 166, 174
Consumer Reports magazine, 160
contagion discourse, lead toxicity
issues and, 168–69
contamination rhetoric, racial seg-
regation and, 181–82
Cook, Katsi, 208
cosmology, toxicity politics and,
208–11
Creed, Barbara, 141–43
criminalization narrative: lead
panic over Chinese toy imports
and, 176–80; lead toxicity in
African American communities
and, 181–88
“Cripple and the Starfish” (song),
153
crip theory, 186, 200, 215, 258n49
Crip Theory (McRuer), 244n21
critical discourse theory, queer
lexicology and, 84–85
critical geography, animal-­human
boundaries and, 132–35
“Critically Queer” (Butler), 64–65
critical pet studies, 132–35
critical race theory: colorism vs.
racism and, 162; disability studies
and, 184
critical theory: animacy and, 5–6;
objectification and dehumaniza-
tion in, 30–35
Cruising Utopia (Muñoz), 196
“Cultural Animal” (live art instal-
lation), 130, 143–48
 Index
cultural criticism, animal theories
in, 98–102
Currah, Paisley, 137
Cust, Edward, 97
Cvetkovich, Ann, 197–98, 215
Daston, Lorraine, 5
Davidson, Michael, 192
Davis, Lennard, 42
Deaf communities, queer and trans
terms in, 81–82
Dean, Carolyn, 5
De Anima (Aristotle), 4–5
De Bary, Anton, 205–6
Deepwater Horizon company,
224–25
dehumanization: animacy and,
30–35, 40–42; objectification
and, 42–50
de Lauretis, Teresa, 64
Deleuze, Gilles, 5–6, 39, 106, 146,
151–55, 206
Derrida, Jacques, 92–93, 96, 106,
147–48, 232
Descartes, René, 4
deterministic linguistics, 51–52
development, animacy and, 29–30
diagrams in critical research,
38–39; queer lexicology and,
75–82
Dickens, Charles, 184
Dietrich, Kim, 182–83
differences (feminist journal), 64
Dinshaw, Carolyn, 219
Dirven, René, 245n37
disability theory: animacy and,
17–20; coming-­out discourses of
sexuality and passing, 200–203;
dehumanization and objectifi-
cation in, 43–50; intimacy and,
214–21; lead toxicity and, 184–
88; medicalized discourse and,
212–21; queer theory and, 17–20,
218–21; reconsolidation of ability
and, 192; stigma and, 257n28;
Terri Schiavo case and, 42; trans-
287
sexuality and, 153; Travis inci-
dent and politics of, 125–26
discursive mapping, animal theory
and, 100–102
disease discourse: Gulf of Mexico
oil spill and, 226–27; linguistics
of toxicity and, 212–21
disease outbreaks, lead toxicity in
context of, 168–69
disidentification, 72–73, 217–18
Disidentifications (Muñoz), 217–18
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(Heise), 99
Dolly Mixtures (Franklin), 100
domestic security: lead panic over
Chinese toy imports and, 160–
88; lead toxicity as threat to,
186–88
domestic workers, racialization of,
177–78, 255n43
Duggan, Lisa, 62–64, 81, 83
Durkin, Philip, 243–44n9
Durre, Linda, 191
Dworkin, Andrea, 48
Edelman, Lee, 196
electronics waste, export of, 167,
253–54n34
embryos, objectification and de-
humanization of, 44
empathy hierarchy, animacy and,
29
“Enemy at Home, The” (Wayne),
173
Eng, David, 66–67, 104, 219,
250n45, 254n39
Enlightenment discourse, animacy
and, 103–6
Enstad, Nan, 194
Environmental Protection Agency
(epa), 162
environmental threats: animacy
and, 9–11, 16; ecofeminism and,
257n32; Gulf of Mexico oil spill
and, 223–27; inanimacy of tox-
ins and, 204–6; lead toxicity
 Index
environmental threats (continued)
campaigns and, 166–68; in Ponyo
(film), 227–32; toxicity intoxica-
tion and, 198–203
Erevelles, Nirmala, 184
ergative languages, animacy and,
25–26
Esposito, Ricardo, 195
Essay Concerning Human Understand-
ing (Locke), 8–9
“Estrangement of Labor, The”
(Marx), 45–50
E. S. Wells Trade Company, 110
eugenics, 241n31; lead toxicity fears
and, 180–88; neutering policies
and, 134–35
Excitable Speech (Butler), 78
Exclusive Economic Zones, geo-
politics of, 224–25, 259n3
facial transplants, 123–26
Factory Girls (film), 254n40
Fairclough, Norman, 84–85
Fanon, Frantz, 31, 33–35, 49–50,
148, 152, 201
Fauconnier, Giles, 36–39, 52
Feeling Backward (Love), 219–20
felinity: Derrida’s discussion of,
147–48; in Fu Manchu imagery,
116–21; Stalking Cat and, 105–6
Felman, Shoshana, 95–96
feminist theory: dehumanization
and objectification in, 43–50;
disability studies and, 184
feral research, 18–20
Ferguson, Roderick, 18–20
fetishism: genitality and, 153; in
Max, mon amour, 139
Fifteenth Amendment, 108
Filipino Americans, 258n57
financial deregulation policies,
toxicity of, 190–92
Fleischman, Suzanne, 212–21
Flexible Bodies (Martin), 194–95
food, animacy of, 41–42
Food and Drug Administration
(fda), 162
288
food safety, bioterrorism rhetoric
concerning, 253n24
Foucault, Michel, 6–7, 84
Franklin, Sarah, 100, 128–29, 152
Freccero, Carla, 58, 147–48
Frede, Michael, 4
Freud, Sigmund, 79, 139, 219
Fuchs, Cynthia, 149–50, 152
Fu Manchu imagery, queer theory
and, 115–21
Fung, Richard, 250–51n45
fungibility, transsexuality and,
150–55
Funtastic toy company, 174–76
furries cultures, animacy and,
105–6
Gaard, Greta, 246n15
Galton, Francis, 241n31
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 98
gay, evolution of terminology,
63–67
gender: animacy and, 15; animal-­
human boundaries and, 127–30,
141–43; in “Cultural Animal” art
installation, 143–48
genitality: animality and, 140–
43; body without organs and,
152–55; transmogrification and,
148–50
geophagia, 131
geopolitics: affective studies and,
258n58; Gulf of Mexico oil spill
and, 224–27; lead panic over
Chinese toy imports and, 160–88
Ghibli film studio, 229
ghoul health concept, globaliza-
tion and, 169–70
Giffney, Noreen, 85
Giles, Herbert, 108
Gilroy, Paul, 255n54, 259n11
Giordano clothing company, 35–38
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 177
global industrialization, lead panic
over Chinese toy imports and,
164–65, 174–88, 252n16
Goddard, H. H., 255n48
 Index
Goldberg, Jonathan, 70
Goldberg-­Hiller, Jonathan, 237
Goldstein, Marian, 176
Gopinath, Gayatri, 19
Gould, Stephen Jay, 241n31
governmentality, linguistic termi-
nology and, 84–85
grammar: cognitive grammar
theory and, 52; queer grammars
of forgetting and, 75–82; queer
lexicology and, 71–75
Grandin, Temple, 212–13
Guattari, Felix, 5–6, 39, 106, 151–
55, 206
Gulf of Mexico oil spill, 223–27
Gutierrez, Carlos, 165
Halberstam, J. Jack, 217–19, 228–
29
Halliburton Energy Services, 224–
25
Halperin, David M., 68–69
Haraway, Donna, 5–6, 38–39, 101,
193, 247n19, 247n34, 256n16
Hard Core (Williams), 139–40
Harper’s Weekly magazine, 111–14,
219
Hartman, Saidiya, 151, 181
Harvey, David, 164
hate speech, animacy and, 32–35
Hayles, N. Katherine, 42
Hayward, Eva, 152–55
Heidegger, Martin, 91, 119
Heise, Ursula, 99
heteronormativity: Austin’s work
and, 147–48, 250n44; neuter-
ing policies and, 134–35; queer
lexicological evolution and,
61–63
hierarchy of animacy, 13–14, 23–30;
animal-­human boundaries and,
133–35; animality and, 89–90;
animal language and, 90–93;
biopolitics and, 84–85; inani-
macy of toxins and, 203–6; lead
toxicity and, 159–88; mainte-
nance of kinds in, 127–30; medi-
289
calized discourse and, 212–21;
objectification and dehuman-
ization and, 44–50; racialization
and, 159–88, 234–37; sexuality
and, 9–11, 15, 102–6, 234–37
Hillbilly Teeth toy, 174–76
Hird, Myra, 85, 129–30, 136–37
Hock, Hans, 65–66
homonormativity: life-­death
boundaries and, 196; queer lexi-
cology and, 62–63, 81–82
homosexuality: Fu Manchu
imagery and suggestions of, 117–
21; incest and, 215; lead toxicity
concerns and, 186–88; British
prosecution and purges on
grounds of, 96–97; queer lexi-
cology and, 60–63; sodomy laws
and outlawing of, 123
hooks, bell, 48–50
How to Do Things with Words
(Austin), 94–98
humanism, animal theory and,
101–2
humanness: animacy and, 3; ani-
mality and, 89–90, 99–102; lan-
guage and, 91–93; objectification
and, 39–42; queer lexicology
and, 85
identity politics: in Hong Kong,
36–38; queer lexicology and,
83–85
immunity nationalism, 192–95
inanimate objects: 213–21; toxins
as, 203–6
In a Queer Time and Place (Halber-
stam), 218–19
indigenous languages, animacy in
context of, 24–26, 214, 259n14
inhumanization, 242n45
“In My Language” (video), 213–14
Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, The (Roh-
mer), 117
institutionalization, queer studies
and, 63–67
insults, animacy and, 31–55
 Index
intimacy: 214–21; queer theory
and, 206–11; toxicity intoxica-
tion and, 198–203
intoxication, toxicity and, 195;
queerness and, 198–203
iq measurements: lead toxicity
fears and, 180–88, 255n48; trans-
national significance of, 36–42,
241n31
Irish identity: Chinese immigra-
tion rhetoric and, 110–15, 248n51;
queer sexuality and, 243n4
Jackson, Michael, 130, 149–55,
251n49
Japan: earthquake-­tsunami in,
230–32; race in, 143, 250n34
Jennings, Bruce H., 174
Jennings, Cheri Lucas, 174
John Deere toys, 163
Johnson, Barbara, 235–36
Johnson, E. Patrick, 59, 83
Johnson, William Henry, 247–
48n47
Kafer, Alison, 43, 48–49, 218–19
Kang, Laura Hyun Yi, 164, 252n8
Karloff, Boris, 117–18
Kennedy Krieger Institute, 181–82
Kerry, John, 43
Kim, Daniel Y., 117
Kim, Elaine, 120–21
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 259n14
kinship relations: animal-­human
boundaries and, 132–35; child-
care labor and, 177; in Ponyo
(film), 228–32
Kinsman, Sharon, 136–37
Kondo, Katsuya, 229
Kosek, Jake, 253n26
Kristeva, Julia, 40
labor: Chinese working conditions,
research on, 173–74, 254n40; dis-
aster migrants, Gulf of Mexico
oil spill and, 226; immigration
and racialization of, 107–15; lead
toxicity and conditions for, 173–
290
88; objectification and dehuman-
ization of, 45–50
LaDuke, Winona, 208
Lai, Jimmy, 35–40, 54–55
Lamaze Infant Development Sys-
tem, 163
Langacker, Ronald, 29, 52
language: animal, 90–93; Austin’s
theory of, 93–98; in Max, mon
amour, 141–43
Laqueur, Thomas, 141–43
Latour, Bruno, 5–6
Lawrence v. Texas, 123
lead: animacy and toxicity of,
15–16; globalization and mobility
of, 167–69; medicalization of
toxicity management and, 159,
251n1; “panic” in U.S. over Chi-
nese toys containing, 159–88;
racial issues concerning, 159–60,
180–88, 252n15; risks for workers
exposed to, 173–80; stereotypes
of Chinese identity and panic
concerning, 169–73; U.S. his-
tory regarding toxicity of, 166;
as xenobiotic, 205–6
lesbian: evolution of terminology,
63–67; stone butch culture and,
216–17; trauma and, 215
liberalism: hierarchy of animacy
and, 92–93; queer theory and,
66–67
licking: intimacy and, 207; lead
toxicity and, 184–88
Lieberman, Joe, 172
life-­death boundaries: animacy
and, 1–2, 4–7, 17–20; Gulf of
Mexico oil spill and, 224–27; in-
animacy of toxins and, 203–6;
lead toxicity and, 167–88; Terri
Schiavo case and, 42; toxicity
and, 193–95
linguistic theory: animacy and,
8–14; animal language and,
90–93; diagram applications
in, 38–39; history of animacy
 Index
within, 23–30; lexical acts and,
67–70; queer grammars of for-
getting and, 75–82; queer theory
lexicology and, 63–67; thought
and cognition and, 51–55
Linnaeus, Carl, 92
Li Peng, 35–38
Lippit, Akira Mizuta, 90–91, 100–
101, 143
“Living on Earth” (npr radio pro-
gram), 182
Locke, John, 8–9
“Looking for My Penis” (Fung),
250–51n45
Lorde, Audre, 49
Lott, Eric, 184
Love, Heather, 219–20
Lowe, Lisa, 107–8
macaca incident: animacy and,
31–35, 39–40; thought and cog-
nition and, 51–55
MacKinnon, Catharine, 48–49
mad hatter’s syndrome, 211–12
Making Sex: Body and Gender from
the Greeks to Freud (Laqueur),
141–43
“Manifesto for Cyborgs” (Har-
away), 193–95
marriage: Austin’s theory of lan-
guage and ceremonies for,
94–98, 247n19; objectification
in ceremonies for, 72; queerness
and role of, 66–67
Martin, Emily, 194–95
Marx, Karl: animacy and theo-
ries of, 31–35, 83; objectification
and dehumanization in work of,
43–50
masculinity: blackface minstrelsy
and, 184; Fu Manchu imagery
and, 115–21
Mask of Fu Manchu, The (film), 117–
18
masks, toxicity and sexuality and,
198–203
mass media: animacy theory and,
291
108–15; lead panic over Chinese
toy imports and, 161–88, 252n15,
254n41
master toxicity narrative, lead
panic over Chinese toy imports
and, 164–88
materiality: animacy and, 5–7;
animal-­human boundaries and,
127–30; of object and subject,
40–42; thought and cognition
and, 51–55
Matsuda, Mari, 32–33
mattering: animal-­human bound-
aries and, 127–30; negative mat-
tering, 96–98
Max, mon amour (film), 130, 137–43,
151–55
Maxwell-­Fyfe, David, 97
Mbembe, Achille, 1, 6, 102, 193–95
McClintock, Anne, 113
McRuer, Robert, 17, 153, 186, 200,
215, 244n21, 258n49
mental space theory, 52
mercury: alleged autism links to,
221–21; toxic effects of, 189–221;
U.S. exports of, 253–54n34; as
xenobiotic, 205–6
Mercury Export Ban, 253–54n34
mercury-­laden vaccines, banning
and exportation of, 198–203,
253–54n34
mestiza queer, Anzaldúa’s concept
of, 63
Mexico: lead suspected in imports
from, 184–88, 252n16; lead tox-
icity in workers in, 184, 253n33
microcephaly, in racialized media
images, 111, 113, 247–48n47
mimicry, colonialism and, 97, 126,
140–41
Minamata disaster, 211–12
Minear, Andrea, 184
Mismeasure of Man, The (Gould),
241n31
Mitchell, David, 19–20, 192
Miyazaki, Hayao, 16, 227–32
 Index
mobility: in animacy theory, 2,
16–18, 106–7; abled embodiment
and, 232–33; hierarchy of ani-
macy and, 29–30, 187; inanimate
objects and, 216; of meaning, in
queer theory, 59–60, 69–70; in
Muybridge’s film images, 139;
in Ponyo (animated film), 229–
32; toxicity and, 15, 167, 177–78,
203–5; transness and, 154–55
modernity, animal theory and,
100–102
molecularity: inanimate objects
and, 204–6; intimacy and, 206–11
Moore, Lisa Jean, 137
Morley, David, 248n54
“Mother’s Milk” pcb-­monitoring
breast milk project, 208
Mukhopadhyay, Tito Rajarshi,
215–16
multiple chemical sensitivity,
257n32
multiracial drama, animacy theory
and, 113–15
Mulvey, Laura, 47–50
Muñoz, José Esteban, 72, 196, 198,
217–18, 220
Munt, Sally, 243n4
Muybridge, Eadweard, 139
Nash, Charla, 122–26
Nast, Heidi, 132–35
Nast, Thomas, 111–14, 248n51
nationality, lead panic over Chi-
nese imports and, 174–88
National Public Radio, 182, 255n52
National School Climate Survey, 71
necropolitics, Mbembe’s concept
of, 1, 6, 102, 193–95
negative mattering, animality and,
96–98
neoliberalism: lead panic over Chi-
nese toy imports and, 171–88;
queer lexicology and, 62–63,
66–67; queer theory and, 134–35
Nestle, Marion, 253n24
292
neurasthenia, historical studies of,
181, 255n49
neutering, biopolitics of, 15
neutralization, marriage equality
terminology and, 66–67
New Haven Register newspaper, 125
New York Post, 124
New York Times, 34, 131, 160, 162,
173, 176, 183
Next Weekly new magazine, 35–38
Ngai, Sianne, 10–11, 255n57
nominalization, of queer, 70–75,
233
nonessentialism, queer politics
and, 69–70
nonhuman animals: animal lan-
guage and, 90–93; dehumanizing
insults and invocation of, 35–38;
Grandin’s discussion of, 212–13;
humanist view of, 101–2
nonsensical calligraphy, 143–48
normativity, animacy and, 15
“Not Dead Yet” anti-­euthanasia
group, 126, 249n69
Nussbaum, Martha, 49
objectification: animacy and,
30–35, 104–6; dehumanization
and, 42–50; thought and cogni-
tion and, 53–55
“Octomom” phenomenon, 134–35
“Of Mimicry and Man: On the
Ambivalence of Colonial Dis-
course” (Bhabha), 97
Oliver, Kelly, 246n6
On the Postcolony (Mbembe), 102
Oshima, Nagisa, 130, 137–43,
250n37
outbreak narrative, lead toxicity in
context of, 168–69
Owens, Jess, 255n54
Oxford English Dictionary, 59–60, 82,
198, 243n8
patriarchy, objectification and de-
humanization and, 45–50
Patton, Cindy, 131
 Index
performativity: animality and,
14–15; Austin’s theory of lan-
guage and, 94–98; queer theory
and, 58
peta organization, 135
pet ownership: animal-­human
boundaries and, 132–35; anthro-
pomorphism and, 105–6, 247n29;
in China, 130–35
Philo, Chris, 129–30
Planet of the Apes (film), 141
Plessy v. Ferguson, 181–82
plushies culture, animacy and,
105–6
Politics of Life Itself, The (Rose), 204
polyvalence, queer theory and
politics of, 58
Ponyo (film), 16, 227–32, 236
pornography: dehumanization and
objectification in, 47–48
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
(Dworkin), 48
positivist theory, linguistic dia-
grams and, 38–39
posthumanist subcultures, animacy
in, 105–6
postqueer theory, emergence of,
57–58
poststructuralism, linguistics and, 53
Potowatomi language, Anishinaabe
cosmology and, 214, 259n14
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 169–70
Primacy of Movement, The (Sheets-­
Johnstone), 93
Proposition 8 (California), 67, 134,
244n30
protectionism, lead panic over
Chinese toy imports and, 165–88
Puar, Jasbir, 6, 81, 172, 196
public health policies, lead panic
over Chinese toy imports and,
159–88
Puck magazine, 113
Quayson, Ato, 220
Queer Attachments (Munt), 243n4
293
Queer Film Festival (Beijing), 83
Queering the Non/Human (Giffney
and Hird), 85, 103–4
Queering the Renaissance (Goldberg),
70
Queer Nation, 61–63
queer of color critique, animacy
and, 18–20, 104–6
Queers Against War, 57–58
Queers for Economic Justice, 63
queer studies: affect studies and,
219–21; animacy and, 11–12, 14,
17–20, 67–75, 82–85, 233–37;
animality and, 102–15; Austin’s
hypothetical marriage and,
96–98; disability theory and,
17–20, 218–21; evolution of,
63–67; feminist linguistics and,
17; Fu Manchu imagery and,
115–21; grammars of forgetting
in, 75–82; historicity and iter-
ability of queer terminology,
58–63, 243n7; human and non-
human animals and, 102–6; in-
stitutionalization and reclama-
tion in, 63–67; intimacy and,
206–11; lead toxicity concerns
and, 186–88; lexical acts and,
67–70; life-­death boundaries
and, 79–82, 196–203; linguistics
creativity and, 67–70; neuter-
ing practices and, 134–35; objec-
tification and dehumanization
in, 48–50, 57–58; queer lexicol-
ogy and, 57–58; renormaliza-
tion of, 77–82; stone butchness
and concepts of, 216–21; toxicity
research and, 196–203, 207–11;
transgenitalia and, 135–37
“Queers United Against Kapital-
ism,” 70
queer theory, cosmopolitanism
and, 232–33
Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexu-
alities (de Lauretis), 64
 Index

race and racialization: animacy Rodríguez, Juana María, 219–21

and, 9–11, 14–15, 102–6; ani- Rohmer, Sax, 116–21
mality and, 90, 101–2, 106–15; Rose, Nikolas, 204
Asian antiblack racism and, Ross, Diana, 149
114–15; colonialism and, 97–98; “Rough on Rats” advertising cam-
concepts of life and death and, paign, 110–11
6; disability and, 184; Irishness Rubin, Gayle, 48
and, 110–15; Japanese attitudes
same-­sex marriage, queer theory
concerning, 143, 250n34; lead
and role of, 66–67
panic over Chinese toy imports
Samuels, Ellen, 200–203
and, 159–60, 170–88; lead tox-
San Francisco Chinatown, white
icity among African Americans
domesticity concerns with,
and, 166–68, 180–88; in Max,
170–71
mon amour, 142–43; metal tox-
San Francisco Illustrated wasp, The
icity and, 15–16; objectification
(magazine), 108–15
and dehumanization and, 31–35,
Santiago, Silviano, 19
44–50; politics of animality and,
sars outbreak, as biosecurity
34–35; queer theory and, 63;
threat, 168–71, 252n19
racialized body without organs,
Scherer, Michael, 34
151–55; of time, 219–21; Travis
Schiavo, Terri, 42
incident and, 123–26
Schweik, Susan, 43
racial segregation, contamination
second-­language English speakers,
rhetoric and, 181–82
thought and cognition and,
racial triangularization, 110–15
54–55
radiation, threats from, 253n26
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 64–65,
“Range” (film), 154–55
68, 94–95, 217–18, 220
rc2 toy company, 163, 185
self-­identity, lexical acts of queer-
reclamation of queer, institutional-
ness and, 68–70
izations and, 63–67
semantics: lexical acts and, 67–70;
“Reflections on West African Af-
queer lexicology and, 81–82;
fairs . . . Addressed to the Colo-
thought and cognition and,
nial Office” (Cust), 97–98
52–55; of toxicity, 191–92
repetition-­compulsion, queer
sensory impairment, neurotoxicity
theory and concept of, 79–82
and, 204–6
reproductive futurism, life-­death
sexuality: abjection studies and,
boundaries and, 196
219–21; animacy and, 9–11, 15,
reproductivity: animacy hierar-
102–6, 234–37; animal-­human
chies and, 127–30; lead toxicity
boundaries and, 141–43; ani-
and, 184; “Octomom” phenome-
mality and, 97–98, 99–102, 127–
non and, 134–35
30; Asian American stereotypes
Rich, Adrienne, 48–49
concerning, 116–21; biopolitics
Rich, Frank, 34
and, 193–95; concepts of life and
Riley, Denise, 37–38
death and, 6; in “Cultural Ani-
risk society concept, lead-­based
mal” art installation, 143–48; ob-
toy imports and, 167
jectification and dehumanization
Robins, Kevin, 248n54

294
 Index

and, 48–50; toxicity intoxication Surviving the Toxic Workplace

and, 198–203; transmogrifica- (Durre), 191–92
tion and, 148–50 symbiosis, of toxins, 205–6
Sexual Politics of Meat, The (Adams),
tables, Haraway’s discussion of,
48
38–39
Shah, Nayan, 111, 170
Taiwan, repeal of ban on gays in
Sheets-­Johnstone, Maxine, 93
military in, 131
Shelley, Mary, 126
taxonomies, animal hierarchies
Shimizu, Celine Parreñas, 121
and, 26–27
Shukin, Nicole, 6, 97
Taylor, Sunaura, 235
Sidarth, Shekar Ramanuja, 31–35,
Tchen, John Kuo Wei, 113, 248n51
51
techno-­orientalism, Fu Manchu
Siebers, Tobin, 200
imagery and, 116–21, 248n54
sign language: queer lexicology in,
temporality, queer and racialized
81–82, 245–46n56; thought and
dimensions of, 218–21
cognition and, 52–55
terrorism, lead panic over Chi-
Silent Spring (Carson), 189
nese toy imports and context of,
Silva, Noenoe K., 237
172–88
Silverstein, Michael, 2, 24–26,
Terry, Jennifer, 204
240n9
“third-­person consciousness,”
simianized imagery, anti-­
Fanon’s concept of, 33–34
immigration stereotypes and,
This Bridge Called My Back (Anzal-
110–15
dúa), 63
Simon-­Binet scale, 255n48
Thomas & Friends toy series, 162–
skeptical interlocution, concept of,
64, 176–80, 184–88
220–21
Thompson, Charis, 44, 128–29
slavery, animal theory and, 100
thought, cognition and, 51–55
Slobin, Dan, 52
Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and
Smitherman, Geneva, 65–66, 73
Guattari), 39, 151–55
Snyder, Sharon, 19–20, 192
threatened immunity, toxicity and,
sociality, queer theory and, 206–11
194–95
Somerville, Siobhan, 104
tongzhi (Chinese queer termi-
sovereignty issues, lead panic over
nology), 81–85
Chinese toy imports and, 160–88
“Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,”
Spivak, Gayatri, 257n40
246n15
Stalking Cat, 105–6
toxic assets rhetoric, 190–92
Stanford-­Binet test, 241n31
toxicity: abjection and, 220–21;
Stigma (Goffman), 257n28
animacy and concepts of, 10–11;
stone butchness, queer theory and,
biopolitics of, 16; cultural pro-
216–21
duction of, 190–92; discourse
“Stones in My Pockets, Stones in
concerning, 189–90; ìmmunity
My Heart” (Clare), 216–17
nationalism, 192–95; intimacy
Stryker, Susan, 137
and, 206–11; lead panic over
subalternity, 257n40
Chinese toy imports and, 159–88;
Suleman, Nadya, 134–35
life-­death boundaries and, 196–
Sullivan, Nikki, 136–37, 249n20

295
 Index

toxicity (continued) Tsing, Anna, 39

203; queer theory and, 196–203, Turim, Maureen, 140
207–11; racialization of, 15–16; Turner, Mark, 36–39
research methodology concern- turtle’s egg with zero iq incident,
ing, 196–203 animacy and, 35–40
transbiology, animal-­human Tuskegee Institute, 182
boundaries and, 128–29
Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, The
transcorporeality, inanimate ob-
(Schweik), 43
jects and, 204
United Nations Convention on the
transformation, objectification and
Law of the Sea (unclos), 259n3
dehumanization and, 44–50
untouchability, affect and, 216–21
transgender: Asian American im-
possible possibility of, 121; cas- vegetables, animacy and, 39–42
tration and, 154–55; lexicology verbalization of queer, 75–82
and definitions of, 243n8; sign Verspoor, Merjolyn, 245n37
language for, 82 Vibrant Matter (Bennett), 5
transgenitalia, animal-­human visual media: animacy theory and,
boundaries and, 135–37 108–15; lead panic over Chinese
transitivity, lead panic over Chinese toy imports and, 161–88
toy imports and issues of, 178–88 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
transmogrification: in film ani- Cinema” (Mulvey), 47
mation, 229–32; human-­animal Vivid pornography company, 135
boundaries and, 148–50
Wald, Priscilla, 168–69
transnational interactions: animacy
Ward, Arthur Sarsfield (Sax Roh-
research and, 18–20; lead panic
mer), 116–21
over Chinese toy imports and,
Warner, Michael, 64
165–69, 183–88; thought and cog-
waste immunity, objectification
nition and, 54–55
and dehumanization and, 44
transness, animality and, 127–30,
Weightman, John, 96
154–55
welfare mothers, racialized images
transobjectivity: inanimate objects
of, 134–35
and, 204–6; language and affect
Wendell, Susan, 48
and, 214–21
Western philosophy, animacy in,
transsexuality: body without
4–7
organs and, 151–55; Michael
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 51–52
Jackson and, 150–55; stone
Wilbert, Chris, 129–30
butchness and, 216–21; trans-
Wilkerson, Abby, 215
mogrification and, 149–50
Williams, Linda, 139–40
transspecies encounters: in “Cul-
“Wily Homosexual, The” (San-
tural Animal” art installation,
tiago), 19
143–48; in Max, mon amour, 137–43
Wines, Michael, 131–32
transsubstantiation, body without
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 239n3
organs and, 151–55
Wolfe, Cary, 92
Travis (television chimpanzee star),
women’s health, toxicity politics
122–26
and, 208–11
Trinh T. Minh-­ha, 47, 237

296
 Index

words: Austin’s theory of language Xiaoping Lin, 147–48

and, 93–98; lexical acts and, Xu Bing, 130, 143–48, 151
67–70; nominalization of queer-
Yamamoto, Mutsumi, 8–9, 23,
ness and, 70–75; queer lexicolo-
28–30, 240n9
gy and, 58–63; thought and cog-
Yellow Peril stereotypes: Fu Man-
nition and, 54–55
chu imagery and, 116–21; histori-
Working Men’s Party, 108
cal emergence of, 107–15; lead
workplace toxicity, cultural dy-
panic over Chinese toy imports
namics of, 191–92
and, 169–88
World Bank, 174
Young, Iris Marion, 48
World Trade Organization, 165
Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), Zami (Lorde), 49
49–50 “Zip the Pinhead,” 247–48n47
Zwicky, Arnold, 67
xenobiotics, inanimacy of toxins
and, 204–6

297
 Mel Y. Chen is assistant professor
of gender and women’s studies at
the University of California,
Berkeley.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chen, Mel Y., 1969–
Animacies : biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect /
Mel Y. Chen.
p. cm.—(Perverse modernities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5254-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5272-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general—Animacy. 
2. Ontology. 3. Perception. 4. Biopolitics. 5. Sex role. 
I. Title. II. Series: Perverse modernities.
p240.65.c44 2012
302′.1—dc23
2012011589